Listen up. It's hard for a gay bear to say no to some BB; however, I miss the good quality bear posts and I'm not taking any more of the glittery $BB DD lying down. This post is a critique of positive remarks made about BlackBerry QNX. This is not financial advice. Welcome to the casino. tl;dr QNX is not high-tech, isn't primed for crazy growth and isn't something that can milk a monopoly position. 🌈🐻 The retards with their bullish DD for $BB are getting off on explaining RTOS, the impenetrable security, the moat of standards, QNX's usage count, the EV & autonomous car revolution, and IVY. All of these points are weak and don't combine to create a strong bundle of sticks. RTOS Stop throwing around the term RTOS like it's magic. An RTOS is just OS that lets tasks ask to be run within a certain time. Engineering students spin up basic RTOSs in half-semester courses. Sure QNX is going to be vastly more complicated than a student project, but stop throwing around "RTOS" like it's secret tech. "It's so secure!" Known vulnerability counts of a software can be low for non-flattering reasons: the software is not open-source, no-one cares to hack it, there arn't many features and the software doesn't change fast. I think that the autonomous and EV progress will increase scrutiny of automotive software and we will start to see some QNX bugs. In addition, the pressure on QNX to start adding features faster will also bring some bugs. Random speculation: I bet that there are some zero-day vulnerabilities of QNX known to organizations like the NSA. "But QNX has a moat! Look at all these safety standards." These safely standards are a shitty moat that will backfire. In general, I think safety standards for software are a joke. Check out this PDF guide to ISO 26262. The standard focus on, among other things, to "use style guides" and "use naming convection" and "restrict coupling between software components". The whole standard seems like a joke. One illuminating document I found titled "Tesla comments on the cyber security regulation interpretation document" (source) is Tesla making recommendations on how to update the W.29 standards. It has the following passage:
"We believe the current regulations and interpretations extensively consider the context of a traditional OEM "model-year" release rate, but do not factor in the perspective of a company that releases software at a faster rate than once or twice per year - similar to the model used by every other modern internet-connected consumer device. The current regulations and interpretations do not fully consider the overhead introduced to a manufacturer that releases software at a frequent pace. We believe is the direction the entire industry will move in, especially to address security and safety considerations. Any requirement to submit documentation, or wait for approval, for every individual software release will compromise velocity and agility; and works against the goals of a cyber security strategy. The regulation should be designed so it is based on evaluation of the manufacturer's internal processes, appropriate records of activities, and trust between manufacturers and authorities."
Claims that Tesla is having difficulty passing these standards carry truth but are misguided; the standards are archaic and don't fit with modern software development and Tesla is contributing to these standards being rewritten. "Look at the 175 million vehicles using QNX!" Is this an argument for growth or for a monopoly? An argument for growth shouldn't be "QNX already has a large % market penetration". In comparison, the growth argument for EVs and self-driving cars is that there are hardly any now, and in 30 years most cars will be EVs with self-driving capabilities. If QNX has X% of the market now, I need evidence for why this will grow. Instead, if you are arguing that QNX has a monopoly, this also seems flawed. A quick google finds other companies have automotive platforms, such as GreenHills software which claims also to be "Proven in Hundreds of Millions of Vehicles" and also meets the standards such as ISO 26262. I'm pretty sure nearly every car released in the last 20 years runs an OS of some sort. It's used to run tasks like like controlling the breaks, turning on your window wipers, lights, sound etc. RTOS is already a fundamental requirement of cars. Saying things like "EVs and self-driving cars means BB to the moon" is like saying we should invest in air bag companies because of strong growth of EVs and self-driving cars. BlackBerry IVY I don't get how this is huge news. The press release is vague on the details. What actually is BlackBerry contributing here? What does BlackBerry get? 50/50 of what? Amazon wants everyone using AWS and will be happy to make deals to get people onto AWS. My guess is that AWS just needs a partner to figure out a good way to design some good APIs for car data. BlackBerry will be useful to AWS for a few years and then discarded. Talent Bullish $BB DD doesn't even cover this, and it's probably one of the most important factors. A software companies long term advantage is it's strength to attract top talent. I don't see BB being able to compete in this game at all. I encourage people to check out some of the reviews of BlackBerry QNX on Glassdoor. It seems that most employees enjoy working an QNX but think that the parent company BlackBerry is dragging them down. Poor QNX doesn't even have a separate careers page—you get redirected to BlackBerry's career page which mixes all of their departments together on one page. Furthermore, looking at LinkedIn profiles of current BlackBerry QNX employees shows that the developer workforce is heavy on the old-guard and doesn't seem to have much young top-tier talent. If $BB can moon, maybe it can attract more talent, but currently, I think talent is going to be a serious issue for BlackBerry QNX. Parting sentiment QNX will either continue to be a low level RTOS that moves your window wipers, or they will be squeezed-out as car companies or companies like Cruise or Deep Scale develop their own low-level OS or use an open-source one. I bought BB in the hype and I think there is a strong case for it being undervalued, but I place a low probability on BB becoming some automotive superstar based on QNX. Position: I have 160 BB shares. Edit: emoji Edit 2: links for LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Edit 3: a lot of you retards overlook arguments and base your opinion solely on me getting high on GME. I love wsb and I don’t want it becoming more of an echo chamber. I wrote about BB as I’m familiar with running software companies and the bull DDs for BB are cringe. I know nothing of retail businesses and I definitely worry that this has made me susceptible to one-sided GME hype.
Bitcoin and speculative stock investing are dark mirrors of each other and the whole system is rotten.
Hey guys. Not entirely sure if this is the right place for this post, but here goes. Since the GameStop short squeeze and the Elon Musk Bitcoin pump happened, there's been a lot on my mind about both Bitcoin and regular stocks and I need to get this off my chest. One thing above all has really been bothering me and I couldn't put it into words until recently: how rotten the whole system is and how it allows a minority to earn enough money to never need to work again. Whether it's Bitcoin or speculative stocks, it works out very similarly. People throw money and hope they get lucky, no better than any gambling. When they win, it's not because they were smarter or did some great service to society. They only had to install an app on their phone, go through some KYC and throw money at their crypto or stock of choice. Money is a currency used to determine how much access to society's resources someone has. The more money you have, the more resources you can access. This can be better apartments, lambos, yachts, mansions, whatever. The winners of crypto or stocks are just gamblers, they get a disproportionately high share of society's resources without creating anything of value. And then there's people like me. I work a day job, working hard every day and trying to improve my skills, hoping to get recognized and achieve some measure of success in life, yet I get a pittance while all these gamblers win big. To be clear here, I'm not salty because I didn't invest money or lost it. I don't believe in either speculative stock investing or crypto "investing". I realize that speculative investments have a far higher chance to lose money, and losing money can really hurt you and your life prospects. With both Bitcoin and speculative stock investing, what happens in practice isn't very different. They're glorified casinos and the winners are set for life, and it really grinds my gears because they didn't do anything to earn it, while I'm sitting at a desk day in and day out, working hard yet barely getting anything out of it. But what's even worse is that the winners' wealth is created through exploitative means. For someone to win money in the casinos, someone else has to lose. Usually a lot of someones. And the losers? They can be drastically affected by their loss. It's even more sad when you realize that most of them were suckered into playing the game with false promises: "Bitcoin/Gamestop is guaranteed to moon! Invest now and you'll never need to work again!" and so on. Then when things fail and the hysteria ends, a lot of people are left holding the bag. Some turn to substance abuse, others commit suicie, yet others double down and throw more money at the casino in the vain hopes that they'll win the next time. And even if speculative investments had a 50% or higher chance of making you a winner, what would that mean for our society? I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure that our society would start running low on resources as people buy more luxuries they couldn't afford before and this would result in price inflation. Which in the long-term, would nullify the winners' wealth and make everyone else worse off. It's all so upsetting, and very sad what our society really values. Sorry if this was too long or rambly, but I really needed to get this off my chest. Let me know what you think in the comments. Edit: This might not have been clear to some, but I'm not a Bitcoin supporter. I know how it works and why it's terrible. Edit 2: Well, my free day of shitposting is ending, so I'm wrapping up this thread. Thank you all so much for your responses! There were many interesting discussions, even with coiners. I might respond more tomorrow, but not as much as today.
Edit 1: More ARKQ buying today (~50k shares). Thank you everyone for the positive feedback and discussion! Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) or TL;DR for the non-military types: LMT is a good target if you want to literally go to the moon, and my PT is $690.26 in two years (more than 2x from current levels). Justification and some possible trade ideas are listed below, just CTRL-F “Trade Ideas”. I hope you guys enjoy this work and would appreciate any discussion or feedback. I hope to catch you in the comments. Team, We interrupt today’s regularly scheduled short squeeze coverage to discuss a traditionally boring stock, LMT (Lockheed Martin), with significant upside potential. To be clear, this is NOT a short squeeze target like many reddit posts are keying on. I hope that this piece sparks discussion, but if you are just looking for short squeeze content, all I have to say is BUY, HOLD, and GODSPEED. The source of inspiration for me writing this piece is threefold; first, retail investors are winning, and I believe that we will continue to win if we continue to identify opportunities in the market. In my view, the stock market has always been a place for the public to shine a light on areas of innovation that real Americans are excited about and proud to be a part of. Online communities have stolen the loudspeaker from hedge fund managers and returned it to decentralized online democracies that quickly and proudly shift their weight behind ideas they believe in. In GME’s case, it was a blatant smear campaign to destroy a struggling business. I think that we should continue this campaign by identifying opportunities in the market and running with them. It may sound overly idealistic, but if reddit can take on the hedge funds, I non-ironically believe that we can quite literally take good companies researching space technology to the moon. I think LMT may be one of several stocks to help get us there. Second, a video where the Secretary of State of Massachusetts argues that internet boards are full of a bunch of unsophisticated, thoughtless traders really ticked me off. This piece is designed to show that ‘the little guy’ is ready to get into the weeds, understand business plans, and outpace analysts that think companies like Tesla are overvalued by comparing them to Toyota. That is a big reason that I settled on an old, large, slow growth company to do a deep-dive on, and try my best to show some of the abysmal predictive analysis major ‘research firms’ do on even some of the most heavily covered stocks. LMT is making moves, and the suits on wall street are 10 steps behind. At the time of writing this piece, Analyst Estimates range from 330-460 (what an insane range). Third, and most importantly, I am in the US military, and I think that it is fun to go deep into the financials of the defense sector. I think that it helps me understand the long-term growth plans of the DoD, and I think that I attack these deep-dives with a perspective that a lot of these finance-from-day-one cats do not understand. Even if no one ever looks at this work, I think that taking the time to write pieces like this makes me a better Soldier, and I will continue to do it in my spare time when I am feeling inspired. I wrote a piece on Raytheon Technologies (Ticker: RTX) 6 months ago, and I think it was well-received. I was most convicted about RTX in the defense sector, but I have since shifted to believing LMT is the leader in the defense space. I am long both, though. If this inspires anyone else to do similar research on other companies, or sparks discussion in the community, that is just a bonus. Special shout-out to the folks that read more than just the TL;DR, but if you do just read the TL;DR, I love you too! Now let us get into it: Leadership I generally like to invest in companies that are led by people that seem to have integrity. Jim Taiclet took the reins at LMT in June of last year. While on active duty, he served as a C-141B Starlifter pilot (a retired LMT Aircraft). After getting out he went to work for the American Tower Corporation (Ticker: AMT). His first day at American Tower was September 10, 2001. The following day, AMT lost 13 employees in the World Trade Center attack. He stayed with the company, despite it being decimated by market uncertainty in the wake of 9/11. He was appointed CEO of the very same company in 2004. Over a 16 year tenure as CEO of AMT the company market cap 20x’d. He left his position as CEO of AMT in March of last year, and the stock stagnated since his departure, currently trading at roughly the same market cap as to when he left. Jim Taiclet was also appointed to be the chairman of the board this week, replacing the previous CEO. Why is it relevant that the CEO came from a massive telecommunications company? Rightfully, Taiclet’s focus for LMT is bringing military technology into the modern era. He wants LMT to be a first mover in the military 5G space, military application of AI space, the… space space, and the hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) space. These areas are revolutionary for the boomer defense sector. We will discuss this in more detail later when we cover the company’s P/E multiple and why it is absolute nonsense. It is not a surprise to me that they brought Taiclet on during the pandemic. He led AMT through adversity before, and LMT’s positioning during the pandemic is tremendous relative to the rest of the sector, thanks in large part to some strong strategic moves and good investments by current and past leadership. I think that Taiclet is the right CEO for the job. In addition to the new CEO, the new Secretary of Defense, Secretary Lloyd Austin, has strong ties to the defense sector. He was formerly a board member for RTX. He is absolutely above reproach, and a true leader of character, but I bring this up not to suggest that he will inappropriately serve in the best interest of defense contractors, but to suggest that he speaks the language of these companies effectively. I do not anticipate that the current administration poses as significant of a risk to the defense sector as many analysts seem to believe. This will be expanded in the headwinds section below. SPACE Cathie Wood and the ARK Invest team brought a lot of attention to the space sector when the ARKX, The ARK Space Exploration ETF, Form N-1A was officially filed through the SEC. More recently, ARK Invest published their Big Ideas 2021 Annual Report and dedicated an entire 7-page chapter to Orbital Aerospace, a new disruptive innovation platform that the ARK Team is investigating. This may have helped energize wall street to re-look their portfolios and their investments in space technology, but it was certainly not the first catalyst that pushed the defense industry in the direction of winning the new space race. In June 2018, then President Trump announced at the annual National Space Council that “it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. So important. Therefore, I am hereby directing the Department of Defense (DoD) and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces". Historically, Department of Defense space assets were under the control of the Air Force. By creating a separate branch of service for the United States Space Force (USSF), the DoD would allocate a Chairman of Space Operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and clearly define the budget for space operations dedicated directly to the USSF. At present, this budget is funneled from the USAF’s budget. The process was formalized in December of 2019, and the DoD has appropriated ~$15B to the USSF in their first full year of existence according to the FY21 budget. Among the 77 spacecraft that are controlled by the USSF, 29 of them are Lockheed Martin GPS satellites, 6 of them are Lockheed Martin Space-Based Infrared Systems (SBIRS), and LMT had a hand in creating and/or manufacturing for several of the other USSF efforts. The Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Missile Warning Satellites (also known as Next-Gen OPIR) were contracted out to both Northrup Grumman (Ticker: NOC) and LMT. LMT’s contract is currently set at $4.9B, NOC’s contract is set at $2.37B. Tangentially related to the discussion of space is the discussion of hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs). HGVs have exoatmospheric and atmospheric implications, but I think that their technology is extremely important to driving margins down for both space exploration and terrestrial point-to-point travel. LMT is leading the charge for military HGV research. They hold contracts with the Navy, Air Force, and Army to develop HGVs and hypersonic precision fires. The priority for HGV technology accelerated significantly when Russia launched their Avangard HGV in December of 2019. Improving the technology for HGVs is a critical next-step in maintaining US hegemony, but also maintaining leadership in both terrestrial and exoatmospheric travel. LARGE SCALE COMBAT OPERATIONS (LSCO) The DoD transitioning to Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) as the military’s strategic focus. This is a move away from an emphasis on Counter-Insurgency operations. LSCO requires effective multi-domain operations (MDO), which means effective and integrated strategies regarding land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. To have effective MDO, the DoD is seeking systems that both expand capabilities against peer threats and increase the ability to track enemy units and communicate internally. This requires a modernizing military strategy that relies heavily on air, missile, and sensor modernization. Put simply, the DoD has decided to start preparing for peer or near-peer adversaries (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) rather than insurgencies. For this reason, I believe that increased Chinese and Russian tensions are, unfortunate as it may be, a boon to the defense industry. This is particularly true in the missiles/fires and space industry, as peer-to-peer conflicts are won by leveraging technological advantages. There are too many projects to cover in detail, but some important military technologies that LMT is focusing on to support LSCO include directed energy weapons (lasers) to address enemy drone technology, machine learning / artificial intelligence (most applications fall under LMT’s classified budget, but it is easy to imagine the applications of AI in a military context), and 5G to increase battlefield connectivity. These projects are all nested within the DoD’s LSCO strategy, and position LMT as the leader in emergent military tech. NOC is the other major contractor making a heavy push in the modernization direction, but winners win, and I think a better CEO, balance sheet, and larger market cap make LMT the clear winner for aiding the DoD in a transition toward LSCO. SECTOR COMPARISON (BACKLOG) The discussion of LSCO transitions well into the discussion of defense contractor backlogs. Massive defense contracts are not filled overnight, so examining order backlogs is a relatively reliable way to gauge the interest of the DoD in a defense contractor’s existing or emerging products. For my sector comparison, I am using the top 6 holdings of the iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (Ticker: ITA). I hate this ETF, and ETFs like it (DFEN) because of their massively outsized exposure to aerospace, and undersized allocation to companies like LMT. LMT is only 18% smaller than Boeing (Ticker: BA) but is only 30.4% of the exposure of BA (18.46% of the fund is BA, only 5.62% of the fund is LMT). Funds of this category are just BA / RTX hacks. I suggest building your own pie on a site like M1 Finance (although they are implicated in the trade restriction BS… please be advised of that… hoping other brokerages that are above board will offer similar UIs like the pie design… just wanted to be clear there) if you are interested in the defense sector. The top 6 holdings of ITA are: Boeing Company (Ticker: BA, MKT CAP $110B) at 18.46% Raytheon Technologies (Ticker: RTX, MKT CAP $101B) at 17.84% Lockheed Martin (Ticker: LMT, MKT CAP $90B) at 5.62% General Dynamics Corporation (Ticker: GD, MKT CAP $42B) 4.78% Teledyne Technologies Incorporated (Ticker: TDY, MKT CAP $13B) at 4.74% Northrop Grumman Corporation (Ticker: NOC, MKT CAP $48B) at 4.64% As a brief aside, please look at the breakdowns of ETFs before buying them. The fact that ITA has more exposure to TDY than NOC and L3Harris is wild. Make sector ETFs balanced how you want them to be balanced and it will be more engaging, and you will likely outperform. I digress. Backlogs for defense companies can easily be pulled from their quarterly reports. Here are the current backlogs in the same order as before, followed by a percentage of their backlog to their current market cap. All numbers are pulled from January earning reports unless otherwise noted with an * because they are still pending. Boeing Company backlog (Commercial: $282B, Defense: $61B, Foreign Military Sales (FMS, categorized by BA as ‘Global’): 21B, Total Backlog 364B): BA’s backlog to market cap is a ratio of 3.32, which is strong, but most of that backlog comes from the commercial, not the defense side. Airlines have been getting decimated, I am personally not interested in having much of my backlog exposed to commercial pressures when trying to invest in a defense play. Without commercial exposure, their defense only backlog ratio is .748. This is extremely low. I understand that this does not do BA justice, but I am keying in on defense exposure, and I am left thoroughly unsatisfied by that ratio. Also, we have seen several canceled contracts already on the commercial side. Raytheon Technologies backlog (Defense backlog for all 4 subdivisions: 67.3B): Raytheon only published a defense backlog in this quarter’s report. That is further evidence to me that the commercial aerospace side of the house is getting hammered. They have a relatively week backlog to market cap as well, putting them at a ratio of .664, worse off than the BA defense backlog. Lockheed Martin backlog (Total Backlog: $147B): This backlog blows our first two defense backlogs out of the water with a current market cap to backlog ratio of 1.63. General Dynamics Corporation backlog (Total Backlog: $89.5B, $11.6B is primarily business jets, but it is difficult to determine how much of their aerospace business is commercial): Solid 2.13 ratio, still great 1.85 if you do not consider their aerospace business. The curveball here for me is that GD published a consolidated operating profit of $4.1B including commercial aerospace, whereas LMT published a consolidated operating profit of $9.1B. This makes the LMT ratio of profit/market cap slightly in favor of LMT without accounting for the GD commercial aerospace exposure. This research surprised me; I may like GD more than I originally assumed I would. Still prefer LMT. Teledyne Technologies Incorporated backlog (Found in the earnings transcript, $1.7B): This stock is not quite in the same league as the other major contractors. This is an odd curveball that a lot of the defense ETFs seem to have too much exposure to. They have a weak backlog, but they are a smaller growing company. I am not interested in this at all. It has a backlog ratio of .129. Northrop Grumman Corporation backlog ($81B): Strong numbers here. I see NOC and LMT as the two front-runners in the defense sector. I like LMT more because I like their exposure to AI, 5G, and HGVs more than NOC, but I think this is a great alternative to LMT if you like the defense sector. Has a ratio of 1.69, slightly edging out LMT on this metric. LMT edges out NOC on margins by ~.9%, though, which has significant implications when considering the depth of the LMT backlog. The winners here are LMT, GD, and NOC. BA is attractive if you think anyone will have enough money to buy new planes. BA and RTX are both getting hammered by commercial aerospace exposure right now and are much more positioned as recovery plays. That said, LMT and NOC both make money now, and will regardless of the impact of the pandemic. LMT is growing at a slightly faster rate than NOC. Both are profit machines, but I like LMT’s product portfolio and leadership a lot more. FREE CASH FLOW Despite the pandemic, LMT had the free cash flow to be able to pay a $2.60 per share dividend. This maintains their ~3% yearly dividend rate. They had a free cash flow of $6.4B. They spent $3.9 of that in share repurchases and dividend payouts. That leaves 40% of that cash to continue to strengthen one of the most stalwart balance sheets outside of big tech on the street. Having this free cash flow allowed them to purchase Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4B in December. They seem flexible and willing to expand and take advantage of their relative position during the pandemic. This is a stock that has little downside risk and significant upside potential. It is always reassuring to me to know that at the end of the day, a company is using its profit to continue to grow. HEADWINDS New Administration – This is more of an unknown than a headwind. The Obama Administration was not light on military spending, and the newly appointed SecDef is unlikely to shy away from modernizing the force. Military defense budgets may get lost in the political shuffle, but nothing right now suggests that defense budgets are on the chopping block. Macroeconomic pressure – The markets are tumultuous in the wake of GME. Hedgies are shaking in their boots, and scared money weighed on markets the past week. If scared money continues to exert pressure on the broader equity markets, all boomer stocks are likely weighed down by slumping markets. Non-meme Status – The stocks that are impervious to macroeconomic pressures in the above paragraph are the stonks that we, the people, have decided to support. From GME to IPOE, there is a slew of stonks that are watching and laughing from the green zone as the broader markets slip deeper into the red zone. Unless sentiment about LMT changes, I see no evidence that LMT will remain unaffected by a broader economic downturn (despite showing growth YoY during a pandemic). TAILWINDS Aerojet Rocketdyne to the Moon – Cathie Wood opened up a $39mil position in LMT a few weeks ago, and this was near the announcement of ARKX. The big ideas 2021 article focuses heavily on satellite technology, deep learning, and HGVs. I think that the AR acquisition suggests that vertical integration is a priority for LMT. They even fielded a question in their earnings call about whether they were concerned about being perceived as a monopoly. Their answer was spot on—the USFG and DoD have a vested interest in the success of defense companies. Why would they discourage a defense contractor from vertical integration to optimize margins? International Tensions – SolarWinds has escalated US-Russia tensions. President Biden wants to look tough on China. LSCO is a DoD-wide priority. 5G.Mil – We still do not have a lot of fidelity on what this looks like, but the military would benefit in a lot of ways if we had world-wide access to the rapid transfer of encrypted data. Many units still rely on Vietnam-era technology signal technology with abysmal data rates. There are a lot of implications if the code can be cracked to win a DoD 5G contract. TRADE IDEAS Price Target: LMT is currently at a P/E of ~14. Verizon has roughly the same. LMT’s 5-year P/E ratio average is ~17. NOC is currently at a P/E of ~20. TSLA has a P/E Ratio of 1339 (disappointingly not 1337). P/E is a useless metric because no one seems to care about it. My point is that LMT makes a lot of money, and other companies that are valued at much higher multiples do not make any money at all. LMT’s P/E ratio is that of a boomer stock that has no growth potential. LMT’s P/E is exactly in line with the Aerospace and Defense Industry P/E ratio standard. LMT’s new CEO is pushing the industry in a new direction. I will arbitrarily choose a P/E ratio of 30, because it is half of the software industry average, and it is a nice round number. Plus, stock values are speculative and nonsense anyway. Share price today: $321.82 Share price based on LMT average 5-year P/E: $384.08 (I see this as a short term PT, reversion to the mean) Share price with a P/E of 30: $690.26 Buy and Hold: Simple. Doesn’t take much thought. Come back in a year or two and be happy with your tendies (and a few dividends to boot). LEAPS Call Debit Spread (Based on last trade prices): Buy $375 C 20 JAN 23 for $26.5, Sell $450 C 20 JAN 23 for $12. Total Cost $14.5 for a spread width of $75. Max gain 517% per spread. Higher risk strategy. LEAPS: Buy $500 C 20 JAN 23 for $7.20. Very high-risk strat. If the price target is hit within two years, these would be in the money $183 per contract for a gain of 2500%. This is the casino strat. SOURCES https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2020/james-taiclet-from-military-pilot-to-successful-ceo.html https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/in-response-to-senator-warrens-questions-secretary-of-defense-nominee-general-lloyd-austin-commits-to-recusing-himself-from-raytheon-decisions-for-four-years https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2019-08-30-Lockheed-Martins-Expertise-in-Hypersonic-Flight-Wins-New-Army-Work https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/hypersonics.html https://research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ARK%E2%80%93Invest_BigIdeas_2021.pdf?hsCtaTracking=4e1a031b-7ed7-4fb2-929c-072267eda5fc%7Cee55057a-bc7b-441e-8b96-452ec1efe34c https://www.deseret.com/2018/6/19/20647309/twitter-reacts-to-trump-s-call-for-a-space-force https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2021/fy2021_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf https://www.airforcemag.com/lockheed-receives-up-to-4-9-billion-for-next-gen-opir-satellites/ https://spacenews.com/northrop-grumman-gets-2-3-billion-space-force-contract-to-develop-missile-warning-satellites/ https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/directed-energy/laser-weapon-systems.html https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/lockheed-martins-ai-applications-for-the-military/ https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/07/new-ceo-wants-lockheed-become-5g-playe167072/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/defense-firms-expect-higher-spending-11548783988 https://www.etf.com/ITA#efficiency https://s2.q4cdn.com/661678649/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/4Q20-Presentation.pdf https://investors.rtx.com/static-files/dfd94ff7-4cca-4540-bc4b-4e3ba92fc646 https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/static-files/64e5aa03-9023-423a-8908-2aae8c7015ac https://s22.q4cdn.com/891946778/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/GD_4Q20_Earnings_Highlights-Outlook-Final.pdf https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/01/27/teledyne-technologies-inc-tdy-q4-2020-earnings-cal/ https://investor.northropgrumman.com/static-files/6e6e117f-f656-4c68-ba7f-3dc53c2dd13a
$SNE, MASSIVE DOUBLE DICK INSIDE. Poised to moon long-term (Computer vision boom, EV boom, autonomous driving tech, gaming boom, music streaming boom, cross-media IP, vertically integrated anime streaming monopoly, online medical services boom, shift to mirrorless cameras)
Listen up retards. Do you happen to feel regret because you always think “ohhh if I yoloed my savings on TSLA/AMD/NVDA 🚀 leaps years ago I could be rich by now!!!” Well if you didn't know already, it doesn’t really matter what happened in the past. Hindsight will always be 20/20. You shouldn’t be harsh on yourself on your past self that your past self wasn’t retarded enough to yolo their savings into AMD/TSLA/.... Your past self doesn’t have the same knowledge that your current self has. It’s fine. If you judged those stocks with the best DD you could do at the time and didn’t think they were worth it, then you did a good job. If you always think about what you could/should have done in the past, then you don't have the right attitude to play the stock market casino imho. The single most important thing is to be able to look ahead. There are always plenty of opportunities around. There are thousands of rockets that are still on earth right now. Some may depart this year, others will stay a little longer on earth. The true strength lies in being able to identify those rockets with the knowledge you have right now. And if you still miss most rockets that will take-off this year that's fine, maybe you'll learn, get better and you'll do better next year. Now, what if I told you there’s a big rocket that’s parked right right here on earth and it has decent chance for take-off this year? Maybe it won't quite reach the moon this year yet, but hey leaving the exosphere should already be a cool milestone. It has rock-solid fundamentals and will see lots of growth in the following years/decade. It’s a company that has the fundamental technology to power all the computer vision tech, which is bound to boom this decade. The company we’re talking about is of course Sony, and it is extremely undervalued right now. Its P/E is only 14. They have a P/S of 1.65, a PEG of 0.92 (< 2 is already somewhat exceptional for a company/conglomerate of Sony’s size, under 1 is a steal) Much lower than all of its same-sector peers. This indicates significant undervaluation. Next up Sony has a P/CF 13.2, ROE of 20% (S&P 500 average is 14% which would already be considered pretty good. 20% ROE is excellent), PEGY of 0.89, P/B of 2.65 and finally Sony has $41.6B in cash on hand. This makes Sony one of the cheapest tech/entertainment/EV/semiconductor growth stocks you will find on the market. (ROE of 20% + PEGY of 0.89 + PEG of 0.92 means this company is a growth stock based on the numbers alone, but we’ll dig into the actual company and overall outlook in a moment) I challenge all retards to find a company with similar benchmarks in one of the mentioned sectors, seriously. Quite frankly doing this DD honestly blew my mind. I kept looking everywhere for reasons why the company could be so undervalued and why they may struggle in the future. Very important to look at all the challenges the company faces to make sure I’m not just doing confirmation bias DD. But all I could find was the opposite. After several weeks and months of working on this DD, I can only conclude that it is overall a very solid company for a bargain price. The new CEO is taking the company in a great direction imho and I'm begin to think he could be Sony's Satya Nadella. So if you want some easy tendies, maybe consider $SNE while it is still cheap, I’d say. For the autists out there who care about analyst ratings, SONY ($SNE) currently has 18 BUY ratings, 2 OVERWEIGHT, 4 HOLD and 0 SELL. (= analyst consensus is a STRONG BUY). Very little analysts cover this stock compared to other entertainment/tech companies, so this adds to my assertion that the stock is very much under the radar. Which means you have time to get in before it gets noticed by the larger investing world and before it starts to get a more fair valuation (P/E of around 30 would be more fair for this company I think, but still cheaper than many same sector peers). But, anyway the few analysts who do happen to cover this company are basically all saying it’s an instant-buy at its current price. Most boomer investors still think big Japanese tech companies are dinosaurs that have long been surpassed by China, South Korea and Apple etc ages ago. Young boomers may think Sony = PlayStation and that it's it. But the truth is that PlayStation, while very important (about 24% of Sony's total revenue last year), is a part of a larger story. Lots of investors in general associate Sony with the passé Japanese electronics companies from the 80’s and the 90’s. Just like a lot people may think BlackBerry is a struggling phone company. While Sony may not be the powerhouse in consumer electronics it was in the 80’s and the 90’s, in a lot of ways they are more relevant than ever before. Despite being a well-known brand and being known as the company behind PlayStation, for some reason its stock still seems to be under the radar among both retail and institutional investors. And boy, are they mind-blowingly undervalued. Even if a big part of its business would collapse tomorrow, they would still be slightly undervalued. And I am about to tell you why. (& btw compared to Japanese tech/entertainment stocks $SNE is still super cheap (Canon, Nikon, Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, Square Enix, Capcom, Nintendo, Fujitsu all have P/E ratios ranging from 18 to 77 and none of them have the combination of global clout, fundamentals & growth prospects that Sony has)) 2021 Sony as a corparation is not the fucking Sony from 2005-2015’s, just like BlackBerry in 2021 is not the fucking Blackberry from 2012. Just like Garmin in 2021 is not Garmin from 2011. Just like AMD in 2021 is not AMD from 2012. No, in 2021, Sony is the global leader in imaging technology and people do not fucking realize it. Sony has 50% marketshare in the CMOS image sensor market. There’s a very good chance the smartphone in your pocket has Sony image sensors (unless it’s a Samsung phone). Sony image sensors are powering a big part of today's vision/camera technology. And they will power even more of tomorrow's computer vision tech. In 2021, Sony is a behemoth in video games, music, anime, movies and TV show production. Sony is present in every segment of entertainment. Sony’s entertainment branches have been doing great business over the past 5 years, especially music and PlayStation. Additionally, Sony Pictures has completely turned around. In 2021, Sony is the world’s biggest music publisher (and second biggest music company overall). Music streaming has been a boon for Sony Music and will continue to be. In 2021, Sony is among the biggest mobile gaming companies in the world (yes, you read that right). And it’s mainly thanks to one game (Fate/Grand Order) that nets them over $1B revenue each year. One of the biggest mobile gaming companies + arguably biggest gaming brand in the world (PlayStation). In 2021, Sony is an EV company. They surprised the world when they revealed their “Vision-S” at CES 2020. At the reception was fantastic. It is seriously one of the best looking EV’s. They already sell sensors to Toyota. Sony will most like sell the Vision-S's tech to other car manufacturers (sensors for driving assistence / autonomous driving, LiDAR tech, infotainment system). 40 sensors in the Sony Vision-S Considering the overwhelmingly good reception of the Vision-S so far, I suspect the Vision-S could be another catalyst that will put Sony as a company on the radar of investors and consumers. We've seen insane investment hype for anything even remotely related to EV over the past year. We've seen a company that barely had a few EV design concepts (oh wait, they had a gravity-powered truck though) even get a $30B market cap at some point lmao. But somehow a profitable company ($SNE) that has an EV that you can actually drive, doesn't even have a fair valuation? In 2020’s Sony’s brand value is at their highest point since 12 years. In 2021, it is projected to be a its highest point since 2001 assuming same growth as average yearly growth from 2015 to 2020. Keep in mind brand valuation is a bit bullshitty as there’s no standardization to compare brands from different sectors, let alone non-consumer-facing brands with consumer-facing brands. But one thing we can note is that Sony both as B2C brand and as a B2B company is on a big upwards trend. https://interbrand.com/best-global-brands/sony/ https://careers.uw.edu/blog/2020/03/17/these-are-the-10-biggest-video-game-companies-in-north-america-shared-article-from-zippia/ In 2021, Sony is an entertainment behemoth. They have grown their entertainment branches by a huge amount over the past 5 to 10 years (they made some big acquisitions in the music space especially and they’re now also all-in in anime). I don’t think people realize how big Sony is as an entertainment company. I dug up the numbers and as of Q3 2020, PlayStation is the second biggest video game company in the world (Tencent is #1) in revenue (I suspect Sony might dethrone Tencent after Sony’s FY Q3 2020 is released). But Sony already comes very close to Tencent especially if you add Fate/Grand Order (which is under Sony Music and not under PlayStation) under PlayStation. There’s no single other company that has this unique combination of a dominant/important position in all entertainment segments. (video games + music + movies + TV series + anime + TV networks). I guess Tencent maybe? In 2021, Sony has amazing momentum in the camera space. If you’re familiar with the enthusiast photography space, you should know this. Basically, the market is slowly shifting from SLR to mirrorless cameras. This is because mirrorless cameras tend to smallelighter, have faster AF, better low light performance, better battery life and better video performance. Sony is the company that has been specializing in the development for mirrorless cameras for over a decade while Canon’s bread and butter has always been SLR cameras. Sony is in the lead when it comes to mirrorless cameras and that’s where the market is shifting towards. Because the advantages of mirrorless have become more and more apparent and Sony’s cameras have become technically superior, Sony has gained quite a bit of market share over Canon and Nikon in the last few years. In 2019, Sony overtook Nikon as the #2 camera manufacturer. Sony is in an upwards trend here. (they have the ambition to become the world’s #1 camera brand) Sony also has very good marketing for their cameras. (Sony has a lot of YouTubers / influencers / brand ambassadors for their cameras despite being a smaller brand than Canon) (just search on YouTube and/or Google “switching to Sony from Canon” just to give you an idea that they do have amazing brand momentum in the camera space. You won’t get as many hits for the opposite) A huge portion of Sony’s profit comes from image sensors in addition to music and video games. This is in addition to their highly profitable financial holdings division & their more moderately profitable electronics division. Sony’s electronics division, unlike other Japanese brands, has shown great resilience against the very strong competition from China & South Korea. They have been able to maintain their position in the audio space and as of 2020 are still the global market leader in high-end TV’s (a position they have been holding for decades) and it seems they will continue to be able to maintain that. But seriously this company is dirt-cheap compared to any of its peers in any segment and there’s various huge growth prospects for Sony:
CMOS image sensors & Sony’s overall imaging prowess will boom due to increased demand from automotive sector, security & surveillance industry, manufacturing industry, medical sector and finally from the aerospace & defence industry. On the longer term, image sensors will continue to boom due to increased demand for computer vision & AI + robotics. And for consumer electronics demand will remain very high obviously.
Sony is aiming for 60% market share in the CMOS image sensor market by 2026. Biggest threat here is Samsung here who have recently started to aggressively invest in image sensors and are challenging Sony. Sony has technological lead + higher production capacity (and Sony will soon open a new plant in Nagasaki), so Sony should be able to hold off Samsung.
The iPhone 12 Pro has 3 cameras + a lidar sensor. Apple now buys 3 image sensors (from Sony) + LiDAR sensor (from Sony) per iPhone 12 Pro they manufacture. Remember the iPhone X and iPhone XS? That one had “only” 2 rear cameras (with image sensos from Sony of course). Basically, Sony will be selling exponentially more image sensors as more smartphones get equipped with more and more cameras.
Now think about how many image sensors Sony can sell to Apple if the iPhone 13 will have 5 cameras + LiDAR sensor (I mean the number of cameras on smartphones certainly won’t decrease)
Gaming (PS5 hype, PSN game sales are booming, add-on content is booming, PS+ subscribers count is booming and finally PSNow & first-party games sales are trending upwards as well). Very consistent year-on-year profit & revenue growth here. They have a history of beating earnings expectations here. The number of PS+ subscribers went from 4M to 48M in just 6-7 years. Investors love to hype up recurring revenue and subscription services such as Disney+ and Netflix. Let’s apply the same logic to PS+? PS+ already has more subscribers than HBO Max in the USA.
PlayStation (video games in general) has not even scratched the fucking surface. Most people who play video games now are millennials and kids. Do you think those millennials will stop playing video games when they grow older? No, of course not. Boomers today also still watch movies and TV. Those millennials have kids and those kids are now also playing video games. The kids of those kids will also play video games etc. Basically the total addressable audience for video games will by HUGE by the end of the decade (and the decades after that) because video games will have penetrated all age ranges of the population. Gaming is the fastest growing segment of the whole entertainment business. By a large margin. PlayStation is obviously in a great position here as you can guess from the PS5 hype, but more importantly imho, the growth of PS+ subscribers (currently a bit under 50 million) and PSN users (>100 million MAU) over the past 5 years shows that PlayStation is primed to profit from the audience growth.
On top of that you have huge video game growth in the China where Sony & PlayStation is already much better established than Xbox (but still super small compared to mobile games and PC gaming in China). Within the console market, Xbox only competes with PlayStation in North America. In the rest of the world, PlayStation has an enormous lead over Xbox. Xbox is simply a lesser known and lesser desirable brand in the rest of the world
Anime streaming (basically they have a monopoly already + vertical integration, it might still be somewhat niche right now, but it will be big within 5 years. Acquiring Crunchyroll was a very good move)
Music streaming (no, they don’t have a music streaming service, but as music streaming grows, Sony Music also gets a piece of the growing pie through licensing/royalties, and they also still have a little 2.8% stake in Spotify)
Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T and Disney are currently battling it out in the streaming wars. When there’s a war you have little chances of winning, you shouldn’t be the one waging the war. You should be the one selling the ammo. Basically Sony Pictures (tv shows + movies) is in that position. Sony Pictures can negotiate good prices for their content because Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T are thirsty for content and they all want their own exclusive content. Sony Pictures does not need to prop up their own streaming service just like Sony Music doesn’t need their own music streaming service when they can just license out their content and turn a profit. There will always be demand for TV & movies content, so Sony Pictures is well positioned is as an independent content provider. And while Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T and Disney are battling it out on the forefront, Sony is quietly building their anime empire in the background. Genius business move from Sony here, seriously. They now have anime production & distribution.
Netflix has 200M subscribers and they currently have a 250M market cap. Think about what Sony will have in 5 years? >30M Crunchyroll subscribers (assuming all anime will be consolidated into Crunhyroll) & >100M PS+ & PSNow subscribers? Anime and gaming is growing faster than movies and TV shows. (9% CAGR for anime, 12% CAGR for gaming vs. 5% CAGR for the whole movies & TV show entertainment segment which includes PVOD, SVOD, box office, TV etc etc). And gaming as a whole is MUCH bigger than SVOD streaming. Netflix gets 99% of their revenue & profit through subscriptions. For the whole Sony Group Corporation, their subscription services (games + anime) it’s currently only 4.5% of their total revenue. And somehow Sony currently has a meagre $128B market cap?
PlayStation alone is bigger than Netflix in terms of operating profit. PlayStation has a MUCH higher profit margin than Netflix. For Q3 2020 Netflix posted $790M operating profit and PlayStation posted $988M operating profit. Revenue was was $6.44B for Netflix vs. $4.77B for PlayStation. (and btw Sony’s mobile gaming revenue (~$1B / year) is under Sony Music, it is not even in those PlayStation numbers!!!)
Think about it. PlayStation alone posts bigger operating profit than Netflix (yes revenue is bit smaller, but it’s the operating profit that matters most). And gaming is growing faster than movies. And PlayStation is about 24% of Sony’s total revenue. And yet Netflix has a market cap that is equal to the double of Sony's market cap? Basically If you apply Netflix’ valuation to PlayStation then PlayStation alone should have a bigger market cap than Netflix' market cap.
Sony Vision-S & autonomous driving tech (selling sensors + infotainment system to other car manufacturers). Sony surprised everyone when they revealed their Sony Vision-S electric vehicle last year at CES 2020 (in-house design and made in cooperation with Magna Steyr). And it’s currently being tested on public roads. Over the past year we have seen absurdly big investment hype into anything even remotely related to EV’s (including a few questionable companies). We’ve even seen an EV company with a gravity-powered truck get a $30B market cap in June last year. Meanwhile Sony, out of nowhere, revealed what is arguably (subjectively) one of the best looking EV’s. It got very positive reception at CES 2020. An EV that you can actually drive. But somehow their stock is still dirt-cheap based on their current fundamentals alone? Yet some companies that had pretty much nothing but some EV design concepts got insane valuations purely due to hype?
LTE chips for IoT & Industry 4.0 (Altair Semiconductors)
Cross-media IP (The Last of Us show on HBO, Uncharted movie etc). Huge unrealized potential synergy here (it’s about to change). We have seen that it can turn out super well when you look at The Witcher, Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu. When The Witcher released on Netflix, sales of The Witcher 3 significantly increased again. Imagine the same thing, but with Sony IP’s. Sony Pictures is currently working on 7 video game IP based TV shows and 3 movies. We know The Last of Us tv series is currently in production for HBO. And then the Uncharted is currently in post-production and scheduled to be released in July this year currently. If Uncharted turns out to be successful, it will mark a big, new milestone for Sony as an entertainment company imho.
Aniplex (Sony Music Entertainment Japan subsidiary for anime production, distribution & mobile games) had a fantastic year in 2020. (more on this later) There is a lot of room for mobile games growth with Aniplex. Thanks to Aniplex, Sony might beat their earnings forecast.
Drones. DJI just got put on Entity List in USA and Sony started developing drones for prosumer / professional a few years ago. Big opportunity for Sony here to take a bit from DJI’s dominance. It only makes sense for Sony to enter the drone market targeting the professional & prosumer video market, considering Sony’s established position in the professional audio/video/photography space
Currently Sony also has several ventures & investments in AI & robotics
Over the past decade, Sony has also carefully expanded into medical equipment tech & biotechnology. Worth noting that Sony also has an important 33% stake in M3 inc (a medical services through-the-internet company with a market cap of $65.5B) (= just their stake in M3 Inc is worth $22B alone, remember Sony, with their large, diversified revenue streams & assets only has a market cap of $128B?)
Sony Pictures has a great upcoming movie slate (MCU Spider-Man, Uncharted, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Venom 2, Morbius, Spider-Verse sequel, Hotel Transylvania 4, Peter Rabbit 2, Vivo, The Nightingale). They will profit from the theatre reopening and covid recovery. They may even become more favourable among movie theatre chains because they won’t release their movies on the same day on streaming services like Warner (and yeah movie theatres are here to stay, at least for a while imho)
All the above comes on top of established, mature markets (Financial Holdings & Electronic Products)
Oh yeah, btw though TV’s are a cyclical and mature market and are not that important for Sony Group Corporation’s bottomline*, Sony TV’s will continue to do well for the following successive years: o 2020: continued pandemic boost
2020-2021: PS5 / Xbox Series X/S
2021 Summer Olympics (tv sales ALWAYS spike during the olympics) (& the effect is more pronounced for high-end TV’s, = good for Sony because Sony’s market share is concentrated in the high-end range (they are market leader in the high-end range)
2022 FIFA world cup (exact same thing as for the olympics)
You could say it’s already priced in, but the stock is already ridiculously undervalued so idk…
You would think this company somehow has a bad outlook, but that could not be further from the true, let me explain and go over some of the different divisions and explain why they will moon: Sony Entertainment While Netflix, Disney, AT&T, Amazon, and Apple are waging the great streaming war, Sony has been quietly building its anime streaming empire over the past years.
Sony recently acquired Crunchyroll for $1.175B (it is a great deal for Sony imho and will immediately be more valuable under Sony. Considering the growing appetite for anime I honestly do not even understand why AT&T sold it, they could have integrated it with their other streaming service (HBO Max) but ok)
With Crunchyroll Sony now has the following anime empire:
Aniplex (anime production & distribution, subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment Japan) F
Funimation
Manga Entertainment UK (production, licensing, and distribution, UK)
Wakanam (licensing and distribution in Europe)
AnimeLab (licensing and distribution in Australia & New Zealand)
Crunchyroll (3 million paying subcribers, 90 million registered users and 50 million social media followers)
* Why anime matters: Anime growth “The global size is expected to reach USD 36.26 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 8.8% over the forecast period, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. Growing popularity and sales of Japanese anime content across the globe apart from Japan is driving the growth” (tl;dr anime 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀, Sony is all in on anime and they have pretty much no competition) Anime is the fastest growing subsegment of movies/video entertainment worldwide.
Sony also has a partnership with Bilibili for anime distribution in China:
Bilibili already partnered with Sony Music Entertainment Japan to bring Aniplex’s hugely successful Aniplex’s Fate/Grand Order mobile game in China.
Sony acquired a 5% stake in Bilibili for $400M in March 2020 (that 5% stake is now already worth $2.33B at Bilibili’s current share price ($BILI) and imho $BILI still has lots of upside potential considering it is the de facto video creation/sharing/viewing à la YouTube/Twitch for GenZ in China)
Sony Music (mobile games) generated $400M revenue from its mobile games in Q2 FY2020, published through Aniplex (Sony Music Entertainment Japan, “SMEJ”) subsidiary
They are the publisher of Fate/Grand Order, one of the most profitable mobile video games of the past 5 years (has generated $4B in revenue (!!) by the end of 2019 and is still as popular as ever). Fate/Grand order is the 7th most profitable mobile game in revenue worldwide as of 2020 (!)
Aniplex launched Disney: Twisted Wonderland in March this year. In Q3, it was the #10 most downloaded mobile game in Japan. (Aniplex now has two top ten games in Japan)
Fate/Grand Order was the #2 most tweeted game in 2020 and #3 was Disney: Twisted Wonderland. You can see that Aniplex has two hugely successful mobile games. (we are talking close to $1B of revenue a year here). It is the #2 game in Japan by total revenue from Q1 2016 to Q3 2020 and the #9 game in worldwide revenue from Q1 2020 to Q3 2020.
SMEJ earns about > $1B from mobile games in revenue from mobile games and there is still a lot of future growth potential here considering Japan’s mobile game market grew a whopping 32% yoy from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020.
Aniplex recently co-distrubuted the movie Demon Slayer: Mugen Train in Japan in October 2020. It became the highest grossing film of all time in Japan with a total gross box office revenue of $380M. In the middle of a pandemic. It still needs to release in South Korea, China and USA where it will most likely do great as well.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) (Game & Netwerk Services business unit):
We all know 2020 was a huge year for video games with the stay-at-home pandemic boost. The whole video game sector brought in $180B of revenue in 2020, a whopping 20% increase yoy.
But 2020 will not be just a one-off temporary exceptional year for video games. The video game market has a CAGR of 13% which means it will be worth $291B in 2027. Video games is by far the segment with the highest growth rate in the whole entertainment industry.
PlayStation obviously has a huge piece of this pie and over the past years has seen consistent yoy revenue and profit growth. Think about it, for every FIFA/Call of Duty/Assassin’s Creed sold on PS4/PS5, Sony gets a 30% cut. There have been sold a billion PS4 games so far.
5 years ago 20 to 30% of PS4 games were purchased digitally. Flashforward to 2020 and it’s 60-75% and the digital ratio looks set to still increase a bit. This means higher profit margin for game publishers and for Sony at the expense of retailers
SIE has seen huge success in its first-party games over the past 5 years. Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Last of Us Part 2, Uncharted 4, Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone, Ratchet & Clank have all been huge successes. This is really big and represents a big change compared to the previous generations where Sony never really hit it big as a games publisher even though most of their games were considered quality games.
SIE is now not only a powerful platform holdeprovider, but also a very successful games publisher with popular IP’s (Uncharted, God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet & Clank). This is an enormous asset, because firstly it increases the chances of success for cross-media opportunities (Sony Pictures can make TV shows and movies out of it to expand the popularity of those IP’s even more). And secondly, it is an obvious selling point for PS5. The more popular and bigger their exclusive content, the more they can draw people to their platform/service. This should increases PS5 total marketshare over its competitor.
The hype for God of War: Ragnarok will be absolutely through the roof. Hype for Horizon: Forbidden West is also very good already (10 million yt views, 273K likes which is very good). Gran Turismo 7 and Ratchet & Clank will also do very well in 2021. (I suspect that GoW oand Horizon might be delayed to 2022)
PS5 reception has been extremely good. Demand is through the roof as well all know. The only problem is that they cannot quite capitalize on the demand due to lack of supply, but overall, it is a very good thing that demand is very high, and that reception has been very positive. The challenge will primarily supply and production-related for the following 6 months and to be able to maintain brand momentum. Hopefully, they won’t push disappointed/inpatient customers to competitors.
Considering there’s backwards compatibility from PS4 to PS5, users will want all their PSN content to transition with them as well, so I expect them to lose very little marketshare to Xbox. Also, I do not know if Americans realize it, but Xbox is not nearly as big as PlayStation in the rest of the world as it is in the USA. PlayStation just has global brand power that Xbox just doesn’t have, so Xbox isn’t much of threat at all I’d say. Where I live, in Belgium, In Europe everyone is talking about the PS5, nobody really seems to care about Xbox Series S/X that much. Comparing PlayStation to Xbox in terms of mindshare is like comparing Apple to Motorola (not meant to be a diss to Motorola, I have a Motorola phone myself, just saying that Xbox has significantly less mindshare / brand power in Europe).
SIE is likely working on PSVR 2, this could be big.
Sony has a small stake in Epic Games (1.4%) and they have a good business relationship with them, so this might also make them open to release first-party games on Epic Games Store after exclusivity period on PS5.
Remember the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite? I believe that was one of the reasons why Sony invested in Epic Games. It serves as an example how music can sometimes converge with video games, and this can play to Sony’s strengths.
PlayStation also has way superior presence in Asia compared to Xbox. Have been expanding into China as well. Another great opportunity for revenue growth.
PS+ subscribers grew from 5.7 million by the end of 2013 to 46 million by October 30th, 2020. This is an average growth rate of 28% over the past 5 years. Considering most of the growth was early on, it will slow down, but I predict that they will have about 70 million PS+ subscribers by the end of 2023. This is huge and represents a stable, recurring source of income. Investors who keep hyping Netflix/Disney+ will love this, but it seems they have yet to discover $SNE.
There is a reason why Amazon, Google, Nvidia have been aggressively investing in video games & games streaming. They know the business is huge and is about to get even bigger. But considering the established, loyal PlayStation userbase, the established global brand of PlayStation and the exclusive games, PlayStation should be able to easily standoff competition from Amazon, Google and Nvidia (GeForce Now) in the next few years. So far, Amazon’s venture into game development, publishing & streaming has completely failed. Stadia and GeForceNow seem to have a bit more success, but still relatively niche. Therefore, I think PlayStation is well-positioned to remain one of the leaders in the industry for the following decade.
I'll get to the other divisions later, I figured this is a good first step. But so far the tl;dr Image sensors: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 IoT/Industry 4.0 chipsets: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 PS5/PSN/PS+: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Online medical services (M3 inc.): 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Anime: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Fate/Grand Order: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Demon Slayer: Mugen Train 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Sony Music / music streaming (the performance of Sony Music’s in Sony’s business is seriously understated. The numbers speak for themselves): 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Sony Electronics 🚀 Sony Financial Holdings (very stable & profitable business, even managed to grow slightly during pandemic when most insurance companies performed more poorly): 🚀🚀🚀 Still have to cover Sony Pictures, but their upcoming movie slate looks pretty good honestly (Spider-Man sequel, Venom: Let There Be Darkness, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Uncharted, Morbius, Hotel Transylvania 4 so that's worth one rocket as well imho 🚀 tl;dr of tl;dr: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I am an idiot that's trying to understand why $SNE stock is so cheap. Positions: SNE 105C 21st January 22
You’ve probably seen the meme that says we’re living in the wrong timeline. While this sounds like a joke, there might be some truth to it. There are some researchers who claim what happened on 9/11 was a temporal event that caused our timeline to split in two. Supposedly there is a parallel world where the Twin Towers still exist and the apocalypse is being avoided. This is not to say I think we are living in the wrong timeline, but that is something I will get into in another thread. Just know that there is still hope. Perhaps the darkest timeline is needed for some collective shadow work. However, I do think our timeline has been altered and probably more times than once. While this is not something you can really prove, there are many oddities surrounding 9/11 as well as a synchronistic pattern hidden in pop culture that seems to point to this. In the movie Back to the Future, after the protagonist accidentally activates a time machine and alters the future, the Twin Pines Mall becomes the Lone Pine Mall. Notice how the clock reads 9:11 when flipped upside down. 134 reads like hel when flipped upside too. Are we living in a bardo state like in the movie Jacob's Ladder or the show The Good Place? Was this a reference to the Mandela Effect and the Twin Towers becoming the One World Trade Center? In the second Back to the Future movie, the protagonists accidentally create a new timeline where a wealthy man named Biff takes over their town. Biff lives in a skyscraper casino and turns their town into a chaotic dystopia. According to the screenwriter Bob Gale, Biff was based on Donald Trump. This is not a political statement, I’m just saying it’s odd how things turned out. I wonder if Bob Gale knew Trump would run for president? In the Super Mario Bros. movie, a meteorite impact millions of years ago caused the universe to split into two timelines, the one we live in, and one where dinosaurs evolved into a humanoid race. President Koopa, a reptilian human hybrid, seems to be another caricature of Trump. President Koopa wants to merge his dimension with ours and attempts to rule Manhattan from the Twin Towers, which are portrayed as a gateway between worlds. The Super Mario franchise is strange when you think about shamans eating mushrooms to commune with serpent gods. Looks kind of similar, right? There are many more examples of the WTC acting as a gateway. In an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Twin Towers are used to transmit energy that propels the earth into another dimension. Take note of the sphere between the buildings, this will become relevant later. In the intro of Power Rangers: Time Force, a machine called the Time Shadow is seen standing on the towers. Take note of the moon in the background as well. This will become relevant too. During the final scene of Fringe season 1, the WTC is seen intact in a parallel universe. In the intro of Power Rangers: Time Force, a machine called the Time Shadow is seen standing on the towers. Take note of the moon in the background as well. This will become relevant too. During the final scene of Fringe season 1, the WTC is seen intact in a parallel universe. I miss cartoons. Another interesting example can be found in Star Trek. In the show, space explorers are sent back in time to stop an alien invasion in the 1940s that altered the outcome of WWII and allowed the Nazis to invade the US. Once they kill the alien leader, one of the characters tells the protagonist that the timeline has corrected itself just as an image of the Twin Towers burning passes in the background. From Star Trek: Enterprise The idea of a parallel world where the Nazis won WWII is very prominent in pop culture. But why is this? Is it possible creative people can intuitively sense other realities while absorbed in the act of creating? Philip K. Dick believed that’s what he did when he wrote The Man in the High Castle. He claimed: "I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on." Coincidentally, Philip K. Dick was one of the first modern thinkers to predict the Mandela Effect. He once declared: “we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” The Nazis were rumored to be in possession of a time machine known as Die Glocke, or in English, The Bell. They were supposedly taught how to build this device by extraterrestrials and the craft was said to be kept in a facility known as Der Riese, or The Giant. It sounds far fetched, but The Nazi Party was actually formed from The Thule Society, an occult group that dabbled in channeling and other magical practices. They were also known to use the Black Sun symbol, an esoteric representation of a gateway into another dimension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(symbol)) In Twin Peaks, a show about a small town caught in the midst of an interdimensional battle between good and evil, there seems to be a reference to Die Glocke. In season 8 there is a device that looks just like it, and at one point, a character called The Giant appears next to it. A conception of Die Glocke compared to the mysterious bell device in Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is full of occult symbolism. In one episode a character is given instructions to find a portal that opens 253 yards east of Jack Rabbit’s Palace at 2:53 pm on October 1st. This portal is located in Washington. However, there is another in Las Vegas. Strangely enough, on October 1st, 2017, the Las Vegas shooting occurred in a lot 253 yards away from the Luxor Hotel, a giant black pyramid with the strongest beam of light in the world shooting out of it. Victims were mostly those attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival. There's also black pyramids on the instructions. But it gets stranger. Jason Aldean was one of the headliners. If you look at his tattoos, there’s a Jack card and an Ace card underneath a black sun, which as mentioned earlier, is an occult symbol that represents a portal. This card from the Illuminati game is almost identical. A Jack is worth 10 points. An Ace is worth 1 point. This odd coincidence seems to be a reference to the date 10/1. Keep in mind this date looks like the number 101. This will become relevant too. But was the Route 91 Harvest a literal harvest of souls meant to energize a portal? This one is too much of a coincidence for me. The name Twin Peaks seems to be a reference to the Twin Pillars, a Masonic concept that originated from the Biblical idea of Boaz and Jachin, two pillars that stood on the porch of King Solomon's Temple. The Twin Pillars can be found in ancient architecture all over the world and are sometimes used in Tarot. They are said to represent a doorway into a higher realm. In this Masonic artwork, you can see the Black Sun between them. Jachin, Boaz, and the Black Sun. The Twin Pillars and the gateway in between can be represented by the number 101. In Twin Peaks, the entrance to The Black Lodge, a place that exists in another dimension, is depicted as a rabbit hole between two trees, which resembles a zero between two ones. In George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, Room 101 is a place where people’s worst fears come true. In The Matrix, Neo’s apartment number is 101. Here it’s interesting to note that he escapes the matrix by going in room 303. This year marks 303 years since Freemasonry was founded. Perhaps they will make their getaway come December? Many occult researchers claim the Twin Towers were supposed to represent the Twin Pillars. There even used to be a statue called The Sphere placed in between them, making the buildings resemble the 101 Gateway. The Black Lodge entrance from Twin Peaks and The Sphere centered between the Twin Towers. Is it possible that the WTC‘s design was intended to create an interdimensional doorway using sacred geometry? Some say the Twin Towers even acted as a tuning fork. The buildings were wrapped in aluminum alloy with a resonant hollow interior. If you look at the picture above and to the right, you can kind of see how the sides of the towers even look like one. The Colgate Clock also once faced the WTC from across the water. If you’ve read my previous threads, you’ll probably notice it’s octagonal shape. Many portals in pop culture are portrayed as being 8 sided, like CERN, the largest particle collider in the world. Many conspiracy theorists speculate CERN is actually an interdimensional doorway. Some of the scientists working there have even said this. Why is there so much symbolism? Can it all really be just a coincidence at this point? Did 9/11 really alter our timeline? The Colgate Clock compared to CERN. According to many people, 9/11 is the reason the Statue of Liberty’s torch is closed. However, this isn’t true. Lady Liberty’s torch has been closed for over 100 years. Yet, there are some people who claim to have visited it. But according to official history, this is impossible. In this reality, The Black Tom Explosion was the reason the Lady Liberty’s torch closed. The explosion occurred in 1916 and was one of the first foreign attacks on US soil prior to Pearl Harbor. The explosion was also one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever documented. The explosion was so powerful it caused the outer wall of Jersey City's city hall to crack and the Brooklyn Bridge to shake. Ironically, besides Lady Liberty’s torch, the explosion lodged shrapnel in the clock tower of The Jersey Journal building, stopping the clock at 2:12 am. It also caused windows miles away in Times Square to shatter. Perhaps the matrix was trying to tell us something. Was this a time shattering event? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g60763-d103887-r126254125-Statue_of_Liberty-New_York_City_New_York.html Some people also claim they remember the Statue of Liberty being on Ellis Island. However, it has always been on Liberty Island. Once again, this is not something I recall learning in school. I’m sure some people do, but if my theory is correct, it’s because only some people in this timeline are from the old one. However, you can still find what appears to be residue left over from the previous reality. Residue from a previous reality? There are references in pop culture that seem to hint at the connection between the Mandela Effect and Lady Liberty as well. In the video game Assassin’s Creed Unity, the protagonist must find an exit portal to get himself out of a simulation. He finds it on the statue’s torch. In the movie Men in Black II, the statue’s torch is actually a giant Neuralyzer, a handheld device that uses a bright white flash to wipe people’s minds. At the end of the movie, the torch is activated and it illuminates the sky, erasing the memory of everyone in New York City. The scenes from Assassin's Creed and Men In Black II In the Netflix series The OA, a show about people who can jump between parallel universes, the Statue of Liberty shows up a lot. It seems to play an important role that was never really explained due to the show’s sudden cancellation. Some fans have pointed out that in one scene, Lady Liberty is holding her torch in the wrong hand. Some say this was just an error while others think it may have a deeper meaning. The Statue of Liberty scene from The OA. In The OA, the protagonist searches for The Rose Window, an object she says acts like a portal to other dimensions. I find this very symbolic considering the Twin Pillar symbolism mentioned earlier. Many older cathedrals have huge rose windows centered between two tall towers. Old cathedrals with 101 Gateway symbolism built into the architecture. If you’ve read my previous threads, you might have already made the connection that the 101 Gateway is another version of the Saturn Stargate. If you’re not familiar with the theory, we live in a simulation controlled by Saturn and the Moon, and The Elite are tying to break out. Our simulated reality is sometimes represented by a cube, and some say The Kaaba is one of these symbolic structures. The Kaaba sits between two pillars underneath a clocktower with a crescent moon on top. Kaaba at Mecca. Ironically, Fritz Koenig, the artist who created The Sphere sculpture between the Twin Towers, said The Kaaba was the inspiration behind his art installation. We can see this symbolism repeated in much of our pop culture as well. In the video game Fortnite, a giant cube destroys a location called Tilted Towers then forms a portal in the sky. At another point in the game, it is revealed that the cube’s true form is a giant demon named the Storm King. His horns are reminiscent of a crescent moon. The second time you fight the Storm King its at a location called Twine Peaks lmao. But are there anymore significant Mandela Effects associated with the WTC? According to some people, Hurricane Erin never happened in their timeline. If you‘re unaware, like I was until recently, there was a massive hurricane headed right for New York on the morning of 9/11. Because of the events that occurred on 9/11, I understand how Hurricane Erin would be easy to forget. Nevertheless, the storm was strange. Hurricane Erin, which was slightly larger than Hurricane Katrina, received almost no media coverage as she charged toward New York City. On the morning of 9/11, just as the planes were about to hit, Hurricane Erin grew to her largest size, but slowed down and remained almost stationary off the East coast. But right after the WTC fell, she made a sharp right turn and headed back out to sea. Hurricane Erin on September 11th, 2001. Hurricane Erin’s name is also interesting. The name Erin originated from Ériu, a goddess typically seen by the sea playing a harp. I find this curious becau HAARP uses extremely powerful radio frequencies to heat up the ionosphere and create clouds of plasma. Not only does this affect the climate, but the electromagnetic waves produced by it could hypothetically mess with our minds, perhaps changing or even erasing our memories. se many conspiracy theorists blame HAARP for both weather manipulation and the Mandela Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89riu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program In my last thread, I talked about MH370. I believe it’s disappearance, like the events discussed in this thread, was a part of a Saturn Stargate ritual. A sacrifice to the god of time. Would it be beyond the god of the fourth dimension to grant someone access to a wormhole? Perhaps The Elite are not purposely creating Mandela Effects and branching timelines. Perhaps it is just a side effect of trying to beak the matrix. But I digress. At the end of my last thread I said I would talk more about rabbit symbolism and its association with time travel. However, before I talk about that, or the Law of One, I thought I should talk about this first. Thanks for reading. Oh yeah, in case you did read my last thread, check this out. The fact that this article was posted 2 weeks after my MH370 conspiracy post has me kind of spooked lol. https://nypost.com/2020/10/07/washed-up-debris-on-australian-beach-could-belong-to-missing-mh370/
GME: The HEDGE Funds GAME; Pigs Get Fat, Hogs Get Slaughtered
Pigs Get Fat, Hogs Get Slaughtered There are many different players in this game, all very complex with many levels similar to an onion. Whether they are a market maker, hedge fund, quant, institution, etc they all most likely have a long and short book for their investments. The most common reason for this is taxes. The short book is usually based upon technical analysis and will be taxed as short term realized capital gains. The long book is based upon fundamental analysis and will be taxed as long term realized gains. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capital_gains_tax.asp
The U.S. capital gains tax only applies to profits from the sale of assets held for more than a year, referred to as "long term capital gains." The rates are 0%, 15%, or 20%, depending on your tax bracket. Short-term capital gains tax applies to assets held for a year or less, and are taxed as ordinary income.
I'll stick with the short term for this piece and what may come next for the price of GME. The last few weeks has given their AI algorithms a tremendous amount of data. One of the key data points that they have learned is that, in this instance, retail will buy no matter what the price is, for now. There is an extremely high emotional involvement with this stock and they can tell this by the feedback the system has received. There should be a third wave up in the stonk, the question is how high will it go? You have to come to terms with the FACT that the stock market is a rigged casino, but more importantly it is a fucking DRUG and you all are the money junkies. This is a major part of the GAME. They are money junkies too but in a more controlled manner. They work similar to how a pro sports team operates. They have management meetings where the best available info is presented to the Chief investment Officer of that fund. He collaborates with his crew making decisions with large amounts of capital (hundreds of millions to billions). The retail investor are self directed individuals that are more susceptible to emotion which makes them chase after the herd. They jacked you up with the good shit for a few weeks, giving you hit after hit after hit of that pure Moon juice, making you feel like you are in a rocketship on autopilot to the Moon! Just like any dirty gorilla pimp they get you hooked then smack yo ass down...bitch. They made you watch as they took your money dreams and beat it with a red hot wire hanger for days. We know they are the bad guys in this movie and now you want revenge; your coming back for more. You need that hit again as you feel your brain shriveling up like a grimy old rotten prune. Another whole weekend jonesin' for that money drug hit. Sure, they'll put that wire hanger back on the stove to give you that rocket sauce again...the question is how much? Will it be enough to get you back to where you need to be? Could they be crazy enough to crank it beyond 483? 600? 1000!? I don't think so, and I don't recommend that rocket dream to anyone out there even with money that they can afford to part with. Wall St. is famous for selling you that get rich quick money dream while giving you the fix you crave. That second big hit is usually never as good as the first, but you still crave it and they know that. Then using the old hood street hustle, a dude dressed like a lady at night, lures you in and clocks you over the head behind the dumpster at Wendy's and hot rods you for everything you got. Don't get tricked!
Elliott Wave Theory
They will use this against you almost every time.
Ralph Nelson Elliott developed the Elliott Wave Theory in the 1930s.1 Elliott believed that stock markets, generally thought to behave in a somewhat random and chaotic manner, in fact, traded in repetitive patterns.
Market psychology shows up on charts.
Elliott proposed that financial price trends result from investors' predominant psychology. He found that swings in mass psychology always showed up in the same recurring fractal patterns, or "waves," in financial markets.
There should be a third wave up in a downward correction pattern. It looks like it has been accumulating and put in a quick bottom last week for the next run up. It looks like it can easily whipsaw back up to 212 - 222 and fill the previous gap down from Mon into Tues. First, it has to run through 100 - 112, then test and break 150 - 158. There wont be much resistance if it can break through 158 then it should be testing 212 - 222 area in no time judging by the way this stonk moves. This should be the top of the third wave up. If you see big volume come in at any point, knocking the price back and letting it rise over and over not allowing it to break out and run over any resistance level; that means its time to take your profits and hit the bid to get the fuk outta there or risk having "diamond hands" holding a leaky sack of stinky shit while your wife packs her suitcase and the kids to go stay at her mother's house "just for the weekend". You may only have one or two days once it starts to be a hero and print a winning ticket, they do not give you much time to make a decision while your high on their Moon Rocks. Those that hold get the mental red hot wire hanger beating again. This time it goes even lower making you puke your guts out in the toilet with a fever as you rest your hot face on the cold dirty tile floor. The fourth wave down, up, and down could go to 60-40, then bounce up to 100 area then down to 40-20 as it trickles off into the sunset. This will leave countless retailers holding shitbags for the long term. I'm not saying it's a bad stonk and we like the stonk but not at these levels for a long term investment. Its clear the big players don't either this is why it fell fast and hard on little volume. The smart money is not going to step in at absurd prices. They don't try and catch falling knives, they drop them on you. Based on the options open interest for Feb (including weeklys) they would like it to close around the 40-60 range every Friday until Feb expiration. I would expect it to pop up and then get shorted hard into this Friday, then do the same the next week. I wouldn't be surprised if it had a gap up this coming Monday 2/7/21 just to get everybody all hyped up on the rocket juice again. You better believe they are taking rips up and down this bitch while selling you OTM options that they will make sure expire worthless.
Conclusion
Fundamentally GME is a turnaround play and that usually takes some years to make happen with the size of a company like this. They have a lot of brick and mortar to pear down over the years in their transition to digital. They should have followed the Gamefly or Steam model a long time ago. Then again, its very difficult to pivot a large company especially when they are heavily invested in physical locations as their primary revenue stream. It may not be too late, they already have decades long relationships with product distributors, they just have to build their online portal out better and cheaper than their competitors. You can h8te on this post all you want if you're a GME fanboy. I like and play video games just as much as the next person and I bought many titles at GME. I am just trying to give you guys and girls a glimpse into how the pro's play major league ball. If you want to step out onto the field against the Wall St. gang be ready because NOW they are going to put an Ace out on the mound and hes' got Vaseline, sand paper, pine tar, and everything else up his sleeve. BTW they own all the umpires too. Just cuz you think you got a grand slam in the first inning while their minor league tryout was caught sleepin' on the mound doesn't mean come second inning they are going to let you crack another one over the fence again. Don't fuckin' cry when the ACE sits your ass down in three pitches cuz you were dreaming of rocketships and drinking moon juice. That's on you. Be smart, don't be a HOG, print a Winning ticket!! Take Care, DISCLAIMER: This is in no way intended as financial advice. I do not advocate anyone take action in response to this writing. This is a fictional post based on how I might play it. I do own the Stonk. Ask your financial professional if shit like this is right for you. For more content like this please follow me and join Secrets_of_WallSt
Artic monke Alex Turner is actually Anakin Skywalker a.k.a. Darth Vader
Okay, hear me out The truth was always right in front of us. The first album was called "Whatever people say i am, that's what I'm not." What about things people didn't say alex was? He WAS those things. Did anybody say he was Darth vader? No! Plot twist: He was. Anakin made his disdain for sand very clear when he once said to padme: "I don't like sand." As did alex when he warned us in the beginning.. "I don't care for sand." Do i need to go any further. Cmon. Still not convinced? Just keep reading. Baby Anakin felt at home in the harsh desert world of Tatooine. Although alex was born and lived in Sheffield most of his life, eventually he moved to the desert.. his ACTUAL home.. a.k.a. Rancho de la luna (Humbug vibezz) .. in the desert.. which called Alex to itself. Dorothy was right though. Anakin was swayed to the dark side by Chancellor Palpatine just like Alex was swayed to the darker, heavier side of rock, by the dark desert rock emperor himself, Josh Homme. Alex literally wrote a song called "You're so dark". He "wants her hard". Why? BECAUSE SHES SO DARK. Anakin mass murdered tusken raiders and the young Jedi. Aliccs, on the other hand, moved other peoples chair (Dont sit down. PRANKED) and murdered any preconceived notions or expectations about AM sound. Lets talk about 505 because 505 underrate. That song is about Anakin having a vision of Padme dying in childbirth. THATS WHY HE CRUMBLE COMPLETELY WHEN SHE CRYY. Need i say more? Yes. Anakin pursues the dark side of the force even though he knows the good side might win sometimes. But he continues to believe in the dark in the middle of the tunnel. Alix pursues the dark side of ROCK as he understands "it might hibernate from time to time and sink back into the swamp. I guess its the cyclical nature of the universe that demands it adheres to some of its rules. But its always waiting there.. just around the corner.. ready.. to make its way back through the sludge. And smash through the glass ceiling. Looking better than ever." Anakin Skywalker finally dons the iconic mask and suit after the battle with Obi Wan and becomes DARTH VADER. Similarly Alex dons the mask, i.e. the black leather jacket, the signature quiff, and the sunglasses (indoors) to make AM. (FULL DARK SIDE). After the first Death Star, Darth Vader made ANOTHER Death Star brick BY brick. Ellix also became more and more dark and made bigger plans and schemes one after another. First there was the Hearbreak Hotel, but then ALEX mfing TUNAH brought out Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. If it wasn't obvious that Tranquility Base is a Death Star, Alex mocked our ignorance and blatantly asked us in the title track.. "Do you celebrate your dark side??!" But then he was like.. "To all those fellas out there who were just too unfraid to call the martini police, this one's for yo girlfriend".. "you push the button and we'll do the rest" In the end though, Darth Vader finally realizes there is good in him after all, removes his mask, and he is at peace. Not only does ALLEX remove his mask but also shaves his head to signify the moon and how much, at peace he now is. Darth vader. Star wars. Science fiction. Lets talk about it. Alicks said he wants to make a point about peace and love but in a sexy way where its not obvious. Just like science fiction does. But he does make a point. Throughout TBH&C he makes many points about peace and love, and its not that discreet but he does it in a sexy way nonetheless. Thats for sure. Which leads us to the conclusion that Alex turner is actually a tragic hero of a science fiction which is our reality. THIS is Science Fiction. The Star wars universe may or may not be real. We are the science fiction extras. You and i. Right now. Alex knows this. He and miles. They know it. Thats why when they're together they Vibe so good. Because they got each other. Following are some darth vader quotes (with alex saying the same in bracket TRYING TO break the stimulation): "No. I am your father." (idk if alax ever said it but he gives "Call me daddy" vibes) "You have controlled your fear. Now release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me." ("Do me a favour. And break my nose") "I find your lack of faith disturbing" ("What do you know? Said, you don't know nothing") "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you." ("Get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook") "Anakin Skywalker was weak. I destroyed him" ("i just wanted to be one of the strokes ") His last words.. "Tell your sister. You were right about me." i.e. Luke was right about there being good in Anakin. ("Oh but i haven't stopped loving you once.") But one thing is for sure. SUCCC AND BRICCC WILL NEVER DIE. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Is the Crying of Lot 49 Partially about Disneyland?
Ok, so, I was recently rereading The Crying of Lot 49 last night, specifically Chapter 3, and I do feel I have a strange hypothesis about sections of that chapter that may be a complete projection, but the more that I look into the content of the sections I will parse out in particular, and the more research that I do, the more evidence seems to fall in place that sort of freaks me out and confirms my theory. Being freaks yourselves, I thought this would be the place for me to project my world, so to speak, and see if what I’m seeing is in any way based in reality or if I’m instead way off base. My hypothesis is that Chapter 3 of The Crying of Lot 49, and specifically the Lake Inverity/Bone charcoal/Tony JaguaFangoso Lagoon section might be subtextually about Disneyland. I have struggled to find much about these particular sections of this chapter related to Disney. I own J. Kerry Grant’s A Companion to Lot 49, have scoured the Pynchon Wiki, read the reddit post discussion for Chapter 3 of this book, and tried Googling as much about it as I could, and I haven’t found anything to suggest Disneyland, so this is either a relatively new idea or one that is inaccurate as hell. Oh, boy! To begin, I will say, I am fascinated and obsessed with Disneyland and Disney World which is maybe why I found some of the information I found within Lot 49 to begin with. One could say I have a perverse fascination with the 2 theme parks which has led me to all manner of revelations. In the same way that Pynchon, being from what I can tell, a heretical Catholic, has a perverse fascination with the sacred through the filter of the profane, I am somehow deeply attracted to and obsessed with all things Disney even though I think they are essentially a fascist, culturally banal, destructive force. Similar to how I believe Oedipa may have with Disneyland in the novel, I “fell in love with it (41).” What can I say? The first half of Chapter 3 which I will focus on, involves Oedipa’s continued revelations. She gets her first peek at WASTE, the Tristero, the posthorn, and the Boeing-esque Yoyodyne is introduced. The plot of the novel really starts to thicken, or to put it a different way, the tapestry, the maaswork, really starts to come together, narrative threads criss-crossing every which way in all directions at once. A resource that was helpful for much of my understanding of this chapter and even just in how I read much of Lot 49 in general is Charles Hollander’s article on the novel: “Pynchon, JFK, and the CIA.” I’ll post it below. https://www.vheissu.net/articles/hollander_49.php Chapter 3, according to Hollander, is where some of the first hints of JFK’s assasination are placed. According to Hollander, this chapter uses allusion, parody, analogy, and enthymeme to encode its secret message about the JFK assassination. Mike Faloppian’s Peter Pinguid Society’s Dallas chapter certainly suggests this. I mention this, partially, to say that, in a way, I could maybe call what I’m trying to figure out here “Pynchon, Disney, and the CIA,” since in many ways what I’m wrestling with is what I perceive to be many hidden references to Disney's shaddy dealings throughout 40s and 50s Californian history. Disney World, in particular, does have a direct history of involvement with the CIA with regard to how it acquired its real estate holdings, for example, which interestingly enough is what a chunk of this chapter is about when it comes to its references to Inverarity (not Disney World, but real estate holdings in general, Inverarity's more specifically). The first section of the chapter that gave me some strange vibes regarding Disneyland was the section where Metzger, Oedipa, and the Paranoids go to Fangoso Lagoon, “one of Inverarity’s last big projects (40).” I will quote some of these sections below where these vibes first made themselves known. “Somewhere beyond the battering, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or smell this but it was there, something tidel began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding (40-41).” This first quote stood out to me because it reminded me of the printed circuit Oedipa sees in Chapter 2. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Oedpia looks out at the landscape and sees it as deeply controlled, planned, almost machine-like or circuit-like. I don’t think this is a wildly different passage from that one. It, like the previous seciton forces the reader to ask the question: how did America come to be how it is now? This is an important question Lot 49 is always forcing its reader to ask. How did the deep conservatism or fascism creep in? Would the answer not be the subject of this book? Communication systems. What company is in charge of some of the most monopolized forms of our communication systems to this day? Disney, of course! Is this an accident? Was it planned? The malignant, magic forces referenced in Chapter 1 may have made it so, may have “urged [the] sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across the dark beige hills (40).” Surely the Walt Disney Company has done as much as any to reinforce suburban 3-bedroom forms of existence that have had a stranglehold on our cultural existence for so many years, than just about any, right? But this was just where I started to get the first inkling of vibes about Disneyland. To continue with another quote: “They came in among earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry, and eventually, shimmying for the sand roads, down in a helix to a sculpted body of water named Lake Inverarity. Out in it, on a round island of fill among blue wavelets, squatted the social hall, a chunky ogived and verdigrised, Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino. Oedpia fell in love with it (41).” This is where my paranoia really got going. Much of the description of the passage above does not sound like a man-made lake or lagoon. Far from it. Lake Inverarity is described as “a round island of fill,” that contains a “social hall,” and as a “Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino.” That sounds much more like Disneyland than just a man-made lake created by a real-estate developer? Also with Oedpia being a consistent parody of housewives in suburban America, it would make sense that she would fall in love with Lake Inverarity if it is, in fact, Disneyland. Plus, there might be another hint in the name Lake Inverarity itself, since it is the only holding named after Inverarity specifically, just as Disneyland is named after Disney himself. I don’t believe that Inverarity is a direct analogy for Disney specifically, but I do believe he is instead an analogy for any of the unseen hyper-capitalist forces that have come to dominate our culture, Disney clearly being one example. And just a side note before I continue with some of my evidence. It would make complete sense, this being a novel about Southern California, its real-estate development, and history, that Pynchon would eventually have to get to Disneyland. It is a property in Southern California, that especially between 1955 and 1965 had to have HUGE influence. How could he not incorporate it even if it was only referred to passively or encoded into the references of the text (much in the same way Hollander argues that Pynchon does the same for JFK’s assassination). There is another passage that REALLY got me convinced about my above theory, the section where Manny DiPresso is discussing the bone charcoal “used in the R&D phase of the filter program. Back around the early 50’s.” Here it is: “Presently the bodies sank and stayed where they were till the early ‘50s, when Tony Jaguar, who’d been a corporal in an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago diPieta and knew about what was at the bottom, decided among some colleagues to see what he could salvage. All they managed to come up with was bones. Out of some murky train of reasoning, which may have included the observed fact that American tourists beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything; and stories about Forest Lawn and the American cult of the dead; possibly some dim hope that Senator McCarthy, and others of his persuasion, in those days having achieved a certain ascendancy over the rich cretini from across the sea, would somehow refocus attention on the fallen of WWII, especially ones whose corpses had never been found; out of such labyrinth of assumed motives, Tony Jaguar decided he could surely unload his harvest of bones on some American someplace through his contacts in the “family,” known these days as Costa Nostra. He was right. An import-export firm bought the bones, sold them to a fertilizer enterprise, which may have used one or two femurs for laboratory tests but eventually decided to phase entirely into menhaden instead and transferred the remaining several tons to a holding company, which stored them in a warehouse outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for maybe a year before Beaconsfield got interest (47).” When I read “which may have included the observed fact that American tourists beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything,” I could not think of anything but Disneyland. In his historiographic metafictions, Pynchon often superimposes historical realities onto present ones in order to make political, social, and religious commentary that would otherwise be inexpressible. An easy example is the fact that Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel about 1960’s America set in Britain during World War II. In the above passage, if Pynchon is superimposing the strange, seemingly random history of “an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago diPieta.” and is using this as an analogy, to project a world that speaks to his present day, I don’t know how Pynchon couldn’t be referring to Disneyland. The novel is set in Southern California, the place where Pynchon lived in 1965. Wouldn’t Disneyland, the rise of tourism, how that was changing the landscape of America and hijacking the “family,” its communication systems, propaganda, and culture, wouldn't all that have been on his mind? I have a few more quotes and then a possibly even more major revelation before I feel I can finally feel I’ve made my point. Later on in the Lagoon, the Paranoids start smoking pot, and the following happens: “[B]y holding up the glowing roaches of their cigarettes like a flipcard section at a football game, to spell out alternative S’s and O’s, attracted the attention of the Fangoso Lagoons Security Force, a garrison against the night made up of one-time cowboy actors and L.A. motorcycle cops (49).” I believe this “one-time cowboy actor” reference to be a reference to Ronald Regan, a fixture of southern California and one-time cowboy actor, and yet another thread in the patchwork connections to Disney. On October 24, 1947, Walt Disney and Ronald Regan both testified against communism, naming particular individuals they found nefarious communists within the film industry (another communication industry, one could say) before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Which got me thinking, with all the mob references in the above section about Lago diPeta and the bones, was Disney ever involved with the mafia or mob, with “Costa Nostra?” I didn’t find much, but I did find something extremely interesting, which also led to one final even more strange realization. Read the link below, it lays out the story of Willie Bioff, a mobster who attempted to but failed to help break up Disney’s Union Strike in the 1940’s. https://babbittblog.com/2016/10/09/disney-and-the-mob-willie-bioff/ This may seem unrelated to Pynchon’s “parable of power,” but earlier in the chapter when Mike Fillopian is discussing Russia and America, clearly also, yet again using a historical detail as a historiographic metafiction, superimposing a historical reality onto a present one, in this case, that of the cold war, when Fillopian mentions “After the confrontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between Russia...and a Union that paid lip service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery (36),” its fairly clear which side of the picket-isle Pynchon would have been during an animator strike of Disney in the 1940s, or any strike for better treatment, for that matter. In Lot 49, Pynchon has written a "parable of power" about the various ways the circuit board of American life has reinforced the indentured servitude of supposed abolitionists, which in our modern world, could easily be a stand in for the structures of neo-liberalism. And nothing on this earth is more an example of banal neoliberal capitalism than Disneyland, nothing (except for maybe Epcot, of course). This is a lot of information, and I may not have done a very good job of connecting it all or being as explicit as I could have at explaining how specific references hint at Disney throughout the chapter, and this has already become too long, HOWEVER, I have one final piece of information that blows my DAMN MIND that is likely coincidental, but which I still could not believe I found. Inspired by the book and wanting to find more connections in the tapestry, I started doing research into Disney’s involvement with the FBI and found some public records about his direct involvement with them on the FBI's website. Walt Disney was a SAC (Special Agent in Charge) for the FBI, according to these documents, for a period of time, interestingly enough, in the late 50s. There are literal letters to Disney from J. Edgar Hoover himself to Disney in these documents. I’ll post them below along with a number of other links that discuss Disney’s connection to the FBI, the last one being particularly fascinating in its connections to the novel. https://vault.fbi.gov/walter-elias-disney/walter-elias-disney-part-01-of-03/view http://www.schaakstukkenmuseum.nl/?p=2195&lang=en http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/F%20Disk/FBI/FBI%20Press%20Use%20Of/Item%2009.pdf https://www.mouseplanet.com/8987/The_Mickey_Mouse_Club_FBIs_Most_Wanted I very much suggest looking at the Mouse Planet link above. If you have read The Crying of Lot 49 and know who Baby Igor and Metzger is, I VERY MUCH SUGGEST IT. Upon reading this and looking at all the other material, I discovered that there was a child-star, mentioned specifically in these documents, that was to be the child used in a set of documentaries Disney was to make as propaganda films for the FBI specifically, promoting them to the public in 1958. This child’s name was Dirk Metzger. I shit you not. His name was METZGER and he was a child star whose father was in the military. READ THE ARTICLE. His daddy, his doggy, and HIM! And guess what, look at what his profession became after being a child actor in these films? Guess it was: he became a lawyer!!! Baby Igor himself! In the flesh!? Look at the article. It’s all there. I can’t fucking believe it!? Now, I admit, this is all probably just a coincidence. Being 14 in 1958 would put Metzger at being only 21 or so in 1965 when the Crying of Lot 49 came out, so it is unlikely that this is exactly what I think it is, a direct, real, historical correlation, but who knows? Pynchon lived in California at the time. Who knows whom or what he may have come across... Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Maybe Disneyland is nowhere to be found in the California of The Crying of Lot 49. Maybe this is all, as Hilarius would say, a Rorsoch blot. Maybe I’m simply hallucinating. I will say though, either way, I do think the political exigence of The Crying of Lot 49 has done its work on me. Even if this is only an ink blot, a world I’m projecting rather than one that is actually there, I have certainly done more thinking about Disney, its union-busting, suburban-infused. McCarthy-ian underbelly than I have, maybe ever, and that power, and Pynchon's parable of power he wrote in reaction to it, is something that is very much alive and with us today, it is a power that is still creating indentured servitude and whose malignant, “formless magic” is igniting all around us. Hopefully I, like Oedpia, have gotten a little closer to understanding how it works and counting its line of force. Maybe, “If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”
Ok, forgive the formatting. This was originally a greentext post for all the /b/tards at 4chan. It's also a long read but if you can get past that then it is actually a quite interesting story that happened to me years ago. be 22 active duty air force assigned to Nellis in Las Vegas not disclosing job, but no stranger to weapons and tactics get pulled in to supervisor's office one day told I've just been "voluntold" to participate in a training exercise with DOD no other information given other than reporting instructions pretty much any question I asked was answered with "I have no fucking idea " report to conference room at base hotel next morning per instruction see about 12 other guys from my unit also voluntold to be there five guys enter room in civilian clothes introduce themselves as the "WHITEBOX" Group Assume it's an acronym for something, but never explained told we will be upgrading our security clearances hours of paperwork, only told we are participating in a force on force exercise released back to our unit crack jokes about how the exercise is a lie and we will be experimented on return to regular job and time passes eventually assume that it was canceled and forget the whole thing about 2 months later supervisor pulls me aside and tells me that I need to report to a briefing the next day says it’s about "some WHITEBOX exercise" has no idea what it is and doesn't seem to care. once again report to base hotel with the other 12 guys WHITEBOX guys show up and pick us up in a van driven off base to some random office building and escorted into the offices of the Department of Energy, WTF? mystery only deepens, what the fuck is happening? what if this actually is some evil experimental shit more hours of paperwork and security/safety briefings by random suits had to fill out and sign a non-disclosure agreement and that threatened arrest if violated required to turn in cell phones and any other electronic devices in our possession our cell phones get locked in a cabinet while the office phone in the room gets unplugged WHITEBOX guys finally return and fire up a power point briefing first slide just titled WHITBOX Exercise 0X slide also labeled in bold red letters "CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / NOFORN / ORCON this is really starting to feel serious WHITEBOX Exercise finally explained told that for the next two weeks we will be role playing as OPFOR (opposing forces) we will try to attack and penetrate a DOD facility and carry out a simulated act of sabotage facility is protected by a contracted privately owned security force security group is required by the DOD to carry out this exercise in order to audit their protection every couple of years if we succeed, security company fails the audit and looses the contract the exercise is the conclusion of a two week inspection of the security contractors and their procedures every exercise a random military unit is chosen as OPFOR "reminded that we are silent professionals and that this isn’t something we should be advertising shaving wavers granted and civilian attire only FUCKYEAH.jpg power point scrolls to a page with a google earth screenshot on it instantly recognize the picture it's Area 51 holyfuckingshit.exe are we are being told to break into Area 51? can't be real random unit bro pipes up out of nowhere "Is that fucking Area 51?" we are all fucking stoked later told not to call it Area 51 as that just makes you a total chode Groom Lake, Paradise Ranch, or Homey Airbase are the acceptable names many insiders simply refer to it as “The Base” also reminded of the possible legal action via UCMJ if we go around telling everyone about it One of the WHITEBOX guys is now our designated "insider threat" exercise is designed to simulate that someone inside has been comprised by a foreign government he will provide any information that we ask for that he has knowledge of or access to other WHITEBOX guys handle will handle exercise logistics they will provide any weapons or equipment that we request to carry out mission "within reason" told this is not a COD loadout screen ground rules established... will only be provided with weapons that we are certified to carry weapons will be armed with blank rounds or completely empty also no vehicles will be utilized by us within the DOD property landmarkers simulating road chases are not authorized our insertion is simulated so we will already be escorted/processed through various checkpoints and dropped off near the base no impractical equipment requests, so no tanks, helos, surveillance drones, or scud missiles, lol any explosives we intend to simulate will be assessed by WHITEBOX so if we want to blow the perimeter fences we will tell them before hand, they will calculate the weight of the bang we would need, it would be simulated by rocks, and then someone would need to hump the weight number 1 rule established and stressed with a very serious tone we will be escorted by WHITEBOX evaluators at all times within the DOD landmarkers at no point are any of us authorized to be alone in the facility actual security is not laxed because of the exercise, nor is this a free pass to roam security personnel can still use real force in the event that we deviate from the established protocols shown various pictures within the airbase that most will never get to see a specific hangar is designated as our target building. we will need to gain access to that hangar and carry out an act of sabotage for our sabotage we will need to ///REDACTED/// obviously we won't be doing it for real so we will actually need complete a random task inside the hangar task will be designed to be as complex and time consuming as the real thing all while being hunted by the security force insider threat briefing continues, various elements of the base security procedures and day to day operations explained however, get the impression that the chosen source is someone with a generic admin position and is not actually involved with security we are also encouraged to do our own research and scour the interwebz for info about the base told to supply the URLs to WHITEBOX if we find anything of interest. sorry if we got your Alex Jones or Art Bell conspiracy blogs taken offline briefing finally concludes, we are reminded of our non-disclosure policy and taken back to Nellis and dismissed for the day next day we all meet at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada we will be using this location to build our plan of attack and do rehearsals/dry runs it's actually pretty cool because it's on us to plan our op, just a bunch of random Airmen periodically grill our insider with questions and start asking our other WHITEBOX guys for gear we tried to have our insider take pictures of the interior of our target hangar, but he got caught IRL he would be arrested and interrogated by the feds, and the whole op would be dead instead though the guys that caught him received kudos from the inspectors, and he just tells us nope have to rely on a whiteboard sketch of the inside decide to keep it simple, M4 riffles only however I am certified on the Barret M82 .50 cal. we decide that I will carry that heavy mother fucker as well as an M4 and provide overwatch from the distance kind of bummed out because im not going inside it will be on me to neutralize certain security positions that we have previous identified we remind our WHITEBOX guys that the M82 is an anti-material weapon with the ability to disable vehicles they tell us that I will just need to call my shots to the evaluator that I will be partnered with he will radio to the vehicles that they are destroyed and will need to stop driving guess I should mention that is also part of the disadvantage we have we will all be paired with WHITEBOX evaluators who will sort of act as referees during this simulated battle however they will all be wearing bright orange reflective vest identifying them as exercise officials that really fucks our ability to stay hidden and stealthy, but it is what it is also should mention that this is a daytime raid despite our objections sounds like they are setting us up for failure, but they remind us not to think of it like that this is all being done just so the evaluators can get a good look at the security's incident response procedures it's not an unannounced drill, the military doesn't really like to do that kind of thing especially with large scale exercises such as this everyone on the base know we are coming, there's no element of surprise here except with what kind of attack we prep it would be a real hot clusterfuck if the security contractors failed the audit heads would roll, people would get fired, and numerous officers would be relieved of command I still get to attack Area 51 so don't care as this is the coolest thing I've done in the military our plan is starting to come together over the days decide to sacrifice one of us in a suicide bomb attack figure out which of us is the most "FNG" or lowest ranking and make him do it he will approach one of the ECPs (entry points to the base) on foot wearing a rucksack loaded with rocks (make-believe explosives) he will be wearing a uniform and will identify himself as Air Force and will franticly yell that he needs help we don't anticipate that he will make it that far or that the security will actually swallow this ruse however his goal is to get as close as he can to the ECP and yell allah ackbar and release his dead man's switch and try to take out what he can his evaluatoescort will drop a GBS (ground burst simulator) when he detonates GBS is a little miniature explosive device that just makes a really loud boom anyone who’s been through any type of military training is familiar with them, they are used to add stress and create excitement we are hoping this will be a distraction and will get as much security as possible to converge on that location the rest of us will assault from the other side of the base and try to breach the perimeter several of us will also be rucking explosive rocks for the breach chose a breach point that will have us crossing only a minimal portion of the flightline (place where aircraft operate) if we successfully simulate breaching the perimeter the exercise will be paused and we will be inprocessed through the ECP and brought into the base exercise will resume and we will continue to assault towards the target hangar I will stay outside in my sniper position and try to smoke what I can inside the hangar the team will cover the doors with simulated claymores and take up cover two guys will carry out the simulated sabotage act while the rest cover the doors WHITEBOX doesn't have any inert claymores to provide so the will be simulated with small weighted ammo cans the weight is really starting to become problematic so we abandon the claymores and decide to just cover the doors with firepower would really help if we had a vehicle, but not happening to be fair, vehicles wouldn't make it that close to the base if they tried to attack IRL armored or not week one down, plan looking solid considering how much of our attack is simulated two weeks of planning is actually excessive not complaining though cause two weeks of hanging out and smoking and joking compared to normal work at Nellis only downside is the hour drive back and forth each day to Creech AFB casino right outside that base with awesome steak and eggs so not too bad though one of the WHITEBOX guys tells us he's actually employed by the Department of Energy he doesn't actually work at Groom Lake, he works at the Nevada Test Range the massive amount of Nevada landscape that is restricted and owned by the feds is actually impressive contrary to popular myth there is road access to Groom Lake via the adjacent test range, but not too many people actually make that drive. the 737 shuttle from McCarran Airport is how everyone gets there since the drive is long as fuck the main paved road through Rachel Nevada that all the tourist flock to doesn't really have any operational use anymore allegedly we will be driving there through the test range via a convoluted series of paved and dirt roads route is CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET, not kidding DOE dude gives us a tour of the test range one day load cases of water in back of van drive to Mercury Nevada and stop at checkpoint inprocessed inside, get pictures taken and issued escorted visitor passes also required to wear radiation badges once inside get to see all that shit from The Hills Have Eyes, fake towns that were blown up with atomic bombs not as intact as they are portrayed in films though, they are pretty rekt or deconstructed show us a massive crater called the Sedan Crater in the 50's they experimented with using atomic bombs for mass excavation projects hoping they could just nuke the ground and build shit instead of fucking around with bulldozers pretty stupid and impractical but they didn't know any better back then they buried an atomic bomb a half a mile underground and blew it up Sedan Crater left behind as a result and the fucking thing is huge. they allegedly herded cattle down to the bottom of the crater afterwards to test the post fallout effects pretty fuckin savage, and it was actually stunning to look at two hour drive to Groom Lake though endless desert roads now see why we loaded the water, we’d be pretty fucked if the van broke down or got stuck get first distant look at the base without having to enter their checkpoints holyshit.mp4 very few people get to actually see what we are seeing to be honest though, looks like any other air force base I've ever seen except smaller besides the obvious fact that it is in the middle of bum fuck nowhere and its main runway is long as fuck also realize one of the reasons they didn't want us operating vehicles most roads are dirt and the entire lake bed is surrounded by "moon dust" everywhere moon dust is the ultra-fine sand found in certain parts of the desert with the consistency of flour it's also a total bitch to drive in and the security patrols getting stuck is a somewhat frequent occurrence told that they even have some of the AAFES fast food joints there that you find on any other base imagine working at a Burger King that you need a Top Secret security clearance for, how the fuck does that work??? noticed that despite being authorized to be here, we are still being watched by distant security patrols wonder if they know we are the bad guys that are going to be attacking the joint make some minor adjustments to the plan since the google earth pictures lack some detail conclude tour and take the 3 to 4 hour drive back home, most of us slept in the van arrive at Creech next day and see that more WHITEBOX guys have been added to the mix, now there's like 20 of them for the past two weeks they have been inspecting the security contractors and its procedures you can tell a lot of them are ex-military based off of language and the people that are dipping and spiting in empty water bottles the mood is light, all of the exercise planning is finished, nothing to do the last two days we managed to borrow an empty hangar at Creech and used it as a mockup of our target hangar to run rehearsals no longer asking our insider questions about security, instead start asking completely ridiculous questions about conspiracies for lulz accuse some of them of being reptilians to see how they react, some of them get legit uncomfortable before you go sounding off, doubt they are hiding anything, some folks just don’t get military humor one does, however, and shows us a velcro patch that he wears on his rucksack it's one of those standard patches you spot on a pilot’s flight suit that has the name, rank, branch, and blood type his blood type seriously says reptilian it's obvious that they embrace and poke fun at the reputation this base has, in fact they thrive off of it the day finally fucking arrives, time to attack this bitch wake up at 0400 and drive an hour to Creech dressed to kill decide to wear DCU "desert combat uniform" pants and a sand t shirt with my personally owned Blackhawk tactical vest to carry spare M4 mags sometimes the military issues some real shitty gear so our unit is somewhat lax and allows us to personally buy our own better equipment if it has command approved use and doesn't break SOPs also wear my empty gas mask pouch attached to my hip and use it to carry spare M82 .50 cal mags also wear a black turban for lulz that I bought off an ANA (Afghani Northern Alliance) dude downrange used to have a guile suite but it got lost on a deployment so that's a no go unfortunately arm up with an M4 with M68 red dot sight and attach a BFA "blank firing adapter" to the muzzle, and load six mags of .556 blanks also provided with my trusty Barret .50 M82 and five mags there is no BFA for the Barret that I'm familiar with so carry that with empty mags, guess I get to cheat with the weight load up in the vans with WHITEBOX team and drive another hour to Mercury get inprosscessed through security checkpoint and receive visitor badges for the test range drive another 2 hour on random roads passing more checkpoints /// REDACTED /// forced to surrender cell phones, personally owned electronic devices and CAC cards (military ID cards) again receive our escorted visitor passes for Groom Lake and now continue down some of the most forbidden roads in American history start unloading as close to our start point as the terrain allows and hump the rest of the distance on foot with our escorts suicide attack bro hangs back in the van with other escorts and is driven to his start point the terrain is favorable and allows us to set up out of sight hence why we chose the spot I break off and try to set up my nest at my chosen OP "observation point" as discreetly as possible not really stealthy cause I'm being followed by a guy wearing an orange reflective vest that says STAN EVAL and he's just casually walking he tells me to set up the Barret, but just simulate your shots by firing the M4 blanks now in a spot where I can observe base activity and provide cover fire for the breach, but I am also the most easy to spot sniper ever now wait for confirmation that our distraction on the other side has happened, taking a real long fucking time my escort's radio chimes to life and starts talking "attention all WHITEBOX, we now have proper authentication via CASTLE ROCK for initiation of a detachment level exercise" voice on radio proceeds to spit out a long winded exercise safety briefing realize it's been about 40 minutes and we are just now fucking starting another 10 minutes and finally get word that suicide bro is approaching his target escorts all inform us that the security force is responding to reports of an explosion outside of the ECP later find out that suicide bro was stopped and challenged at gun point about 50 meters outside of ECP by a mounted patrol he then just fuck it and started sprinting towards the ECP until they opened fire with blanks and his escort set off the GBS he actually managed to take out the vehicle that stopped him and create several casualties (we gave him the heaviest explosive rocks loadout) overall our distraction was pretty fucking successful give it a another minute or two and finally start shooting and calling my shots to my escort/evaluator he's talking on his radio and relaying my simulated violence, "inform Merc-17 that they are dead from sniper fire" etc... I have predetermined targets to engage based off of what poses the biggest threat to the breach team I actually do some damage and get confirmation of casualties from my escort it's about a 600 meter run to the base perimeter in the open desert so it's on me to try and clear their path as much as I can the plan is to try to lure some security vehicles to our position then eliminate them with the Barret while they are en route the dead vehicles can then serve as points of cover for the breach team as they assault towards the base breach team was also aiming to see if they could snag any security radios from the dead patrols so we can monitor their comms didn't really work out that way however, in the end we simply didn't have all the info about the anticipated security response without giving away too many sensitive details, we all got ambushed by the security from unexpected locations forced to abandon my nest and the Barret to start moving towards another location to back up the breach team that was under fire trade some shots with security until my escort finally announces "ok dude, you're dead. go ahead and lay down" that's it, game over play dead for about 20 minutes while security cleans up the area breach team gets rekt, we managed to get within 100 meters of the perimeter couple of security dudes approach me and perform a dead combatant body search on me it's a specific type of search designed to search a dead body while also checking for possible explosive booby traps pretend to be dead and let security dudes run my pockets finally one of the evaluators shouts "PauseEx" (pause exercise) we got fucking annihilated, no chance this attack was going to be successful our evaluators tell us that everyone did a great job, HOWEVER.... we are going to continue the exercise because they didn't get the chance to observe much of the internal security components we are going to resume the exercise assuming that we were actually able to get inside that target hangar this will give the evaluators the opportunity to observe the security's recap and recov procedures (re-capture and recovery) we all get magically resurrected from the dead I realize that I am actually going inside Groom Lake! Fucking Awesome... spend about 15 minutes policing up the area for brass which means wandering around and picking up spent cartridges board vans and get driven around to ECP. realize that only half of the security force is playing in this exercise the rest are still armed with live weapons and are still performing regular protection duties forced to show our visitor passes, names and badge numbers are compared against a master list that the security has /// REDACTED /// /// REDACTED /// notice a homemade sign hanging on the wall at the security center it’s got a picture of an alien with a red X through it that says "no extraterrestrial entities or relics beyond this point" like I said earlier, everyone enjoys the reputation this base has drive to our target hangar, holy fuck! I am now inside Area 51 use of blanks not authorized indoors, everyone is told to clear out weapons rest of the exercise will use simulated firing, the equivalent of pointing your empty weapon at someone and yelling bang sadly not the first time I trained like this, military does it all the time it’s ridiculous and awkward every time, looks like a bunch of kids playing backyard soldiers with sticks security has already reset its posture, they know we are attacking but doesn't know the building we are hitting we all enter the hangar, get the impression that it doesn't actually get used IRL anymore reeks of mildew and no power inside, dust everywhere in the center there is a pickup truck covered with a tarp and roped off with red rope and stanchions, signs posted identifying it as a controlled area told that this is a simulated military asset and this is what we are sabotaging WHITEBOX evaluator pulls a box out of the bed of the truck remember when I said we will have to do a complex and time consuming task to simulate our act of sabotage? it’s a fucking Star Wars Lego kit! I shit you not! evaluators tell us we will need start building it and reach page 12 in the instructions without errors or mistakes kind of wish we went with our earlier plan and brought claymores cause I spotted some sweet chokepoints outside the building to set them up also wish we had the idea of bringing padlocks and chains so we could lock down the hangar and make life more difficult for the security force set up our spots to cover the doors, we are well versed with building clearing tactics so we know what spots to cover to make it hard WHITEBOX evaluator authenticates over the radio with someone by passing letters and numbers back and forth, process known as sign/countersign voice on radio announces that the detachment level WHITEBOX exercise has resumed showtime! Two unit bros start opening the Lego kit and sorting parts me and the suicide bro weren't supposed to be in this hangar or even on the base to begin with so we don't have points to cover inside come up with idea and ask one of the escorts if we can go out the back on to the flightline plan to walk to two separate buildings in opposite directions and see if we can create distractions evaluators approve the plan, but tell us we can't approach or enter other buildings, nor approach any parked aircraft decide to leave firearms and my tac vest behind for clever reasons if we are unarmed the security will most likely apprehend us, and search us this is more time consuming than just shooting us and will keep them away from the hangar longer exit the back of the hangar on to the flightline and just start casually walking down the tarmac with my escort eventually hear the sound of police sirens in the distance getting louder, hear they come! get the urge to start sprinting but decide not to since it would most likely result in me being tackled on the pavement, fuck that later realize distant sirens are actually responding to hangar after reports of a silent alarm being received so much for the distraction plan decide not to return to hangar since there is not much I can do unarmed, and continue walking down flightline all the parked aircraft I see are just normal military aircraft, although some do seem to have “enhancements” or cosmetic features that I haven’t seen before ask my escort where they keep all the flying saucers, he smirks and just replies "underground" wonder if there are actually any subterranean levels to this base, suppose a lot of these buildings could support that ask my escort if there are really underground levels, he facetiously says “who knows” white pickup truck with police lights approaching fast pretend not to notice and keep walking voice starts barking at me over a loudspeaker "stop right there! do not move! get your hands up! security mercs climbing out of vehicle with rifles drawn, don't see magazines in the riffles, they are part of the drill they actually try to challenge both of us, escort has to remind them that he is out of play security goons bark at me, "face away from me NOW! keep your hands up!" they are actually pretty intimidating, I comply proceed to have me lay on the ground face down with my arms and legs stretched out yell at me to put my hands in the small of my back, palms together, fingers up big black guy approaches me and actually puts his knee on my neck George Floyd style "don't fight me, don't resist me, or you are gonna get hurt" he says puts me in zip ties and picks me up, see other guards still have weapons drawn on me overall whole thing similar to a gangbanger getting rolled up by the cops black guy puts me in some weird and uncomfortable arm hold tells me to start walking while he steers my body with the arm hold and walks me off the flightline taken to a grassy area, get put back on the ground and searched and questioned /// REDACTED /// I try to bluff and say that the hangar will blow if anyone goes inside, see if that stalls them he tries to question me about it, but I can tell he’s not biting, I decide to tone it down and stay quiet cause the dude really looks like he’s going to fuck me up actually overhear his partner talking on the radio, he’s telling others to exercise caution and beware of possible explosive booby traps lights out, realize that someone put a bag over my head evaluator calls out "EndEX" (end exercise) all portions of the exercise are terminated, it's all over black security guy cuts my zip ties, takes off the hood and sets me loose later find out that security retook the hangar with no problems my guys inside struggled with the Legos since it was so dark and hard to see instead of immediately going in, security tossed inert CS gas canisters inside none of us brought gas mask since it was something our insider failed to mention evaluator let us build legos for another 30 seconds then yelled “GAS, GAS, GAS” unit bros in the hangar were told to lay on the ground and pretend to be incapacitated security swarmed the place with gas mask and guns, kicked away weapons they got a similar treatment to what I received on the flightline and got hauled out of there we all regroup at the base's main visitor center for the AAR (after action review) overall security responded quite well, only some points were critiqued, nothing failing smoke cigarettes and crack jokes back and forth with the security dudes, finally get to see the human side of the guy who snagged me on the flightline tell him he’s one scary mofo, he smiles and we shake hands security dudes leave, head to base theater for full debrief WHITEBOX guys thank us for our participation, time to head home wait a sec, let’s see some fucking aliens WHITEBOX guy smirks and says he’ll give us the dollar tour another day drive back to Mercury knowing full well that we are not going to hear back from them, especially about a tour return radiation badges to the Mercury office told that if we never hear back from them that it’s a good sign told that if they do call us then our Tricare (military health coverage) will get put to good use whole experience was cool as fuck one of the evaluators hands out business cards for ///REDACTED/// and tells us to look them up when we separate from the military starting pay for the security force is pretty fucking dope and only certain military backgrounds are considered for it return to Indian Springs and hit up the casino for drinks with the original 5 WHITEBOX guys ask if any of the prior OPFOR units actually pulled it off and broke in told that a group of CCT guys from the 24th STS was the closest anyone’s ever gotten but even they still failed makes sense, I’ve heard that those dudes are legit operators tell war stories and get drunk actually receive a letter of appreciation from the Air Force Test Center Detachment 3 from Edwards Air Force Base, California about a month later it thanks me for my participation in an exercise but makes no mention of Groom Lake my participation in a vaguely worded “DOD exercise” actually gets mentioned as a bullet in my annual performance report mfw I attacked Area 51 tldr - me and my coworkers "broke" into Area 51 with automatic weapons so we could put together an X-wing starfighter out of Legos Thanks for reading. I should mention that I have intentionally withheld a lot of details and even altered a few. I'm not trying to blow up anyone’s spot and compromise shit. Just wanted to share a true story about some cool shit I got to do in my youth. For example WHITEBOX is a completely fabricated name while the whole operation actually went under another random weird name. It still ranks as some of the most cloak and dagger shit I got to do in the military. I actually don’t really tell too many people because it is no one’s business and no one would believe me anyways. I finally figured that enough time has passed and like I said, I have specially tailored this story to avoid leaking any sensitive shit. Overall the base was actually kind of underwhelming. I didn’t really see any earth shattering secrets there. All of the alien and reptilian conspiracy theories were openly mocked and made fun of there. It’s really just a base that gets an extra layer of discreetness and physical security for more sensitive assets and projects to be kept there. The CIA, JSOC and other intel gangs from Washington even have offices out there because it’s just a quiet tucked away place to do business. I will say that their security is no joke and that they have some truly fascinating techniques to detect and deny intruders. Hope you enjoyed.
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